The mystery of being

THE MYSTERY OF BEING
I. REFLECTION & MYSTERY

THE MYSTERY
OF BEING

BY

GABRIEL MARCEL

I.

REFLECTION
& MYSTERY

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

REFLECTION AND MYSTERY contains the first of the

two series of GIFFORD LECTURES given by Gabriel

Marcel in 1949 and 19^0, at the University of Aberdeen.

The English translation is by G. S. Fraser.

all rights reserved

First published in Great Britain

by THE HARVILL PRESS LTD

Printed and made in Great Britain by Hague Gill &, Davey Ltd

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION

page

Research has always seemed to me the word which most adequately
designates the manner in which philosophic thought moves essentially
towards its goal ; I shall not therefore expound my system, but rather
retrace the movement of my thought from its outset, but in renewed
light, and, so to speak, map out its itinerary.

But how do we set about retracing a road where heretofore there
have been nothing but broken trails? Is it not by setting out for a
precisely situated goal, with the intention of reaching it? Does not
this presuppose a result?

We must distinguish here between:

1 i ) Research of the type where result can be severed from the means
by which it is obtained, e.g., a product discovered by a scientist can be
purchased at the chemist's by anyone.

This type of research involves furthermore a notion or a pre-notion
bearing on a certain working and the certainty that the operations
(mental or material) entailed are within the capabilities of anyone.

(2) Research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken
without loss of all reality to the result ; the seeker who engages in such
in investigation, starts, as it were, at random.

This leads to the question of:

How research without pre-notion is possible.

In reality, to exclude the pre-notion implied in techniques is not to
exclude the origin of philosophic research; this origin is a certain
disquiet — a certain exigence (a term which will be defined in Chapter
III). The research is then the successive moves which enable me to
pass from a situation lived as fundamentally discordant to a situation
in which a certain expectation is fulfilled.

The 'ego' of the seeker, as well as the 'ego' of those he ad
dresses, is here neither the individual at the mercy of his states (of
being) nor thought in general.

In philosophical research a literal and simplistic conception of
universality cannot be accepted, and a certain order of enquiry-
becomes established: there are, as well as questions which can be an
swered by ' yes ' or ' no ', other questions which the philosopher
cannot elude, and which cannot be answered thus.

[vii]

His research — philosophical research — will appear therefore as an
effort to put true questions (cf. Chapter IV, on Truth), which implies
that he is endowed with the courage of thought inseparable from

liberty.

II. A BROKEN WORLD page iS

Enquiry into one of the conclusions of the foregoing chapter,
which dissociates truth and universal validity.

Is not this dissociation dangerous?

If not, how, and from what point does it appear so?

Note that the objection implies a pre-notion or anticipated schema
tizing of the relation between the subject and the truth which he will
have to recognize.

Truth is indeed conceived as something to be extracted ; this extrac
tion is referable on principle to a universal technique, with the result
that truth should be transmissible to anyone.

But we are prone to forget that the more intelligence transcends
technical activity, the less the reference to anyone as inderterminate
is called upon to intervene.

This objection is on the other hand a product, as it were, of a world
that ignores exigencies of reflection.

This world of ours is a broken world, which means that in striving
after a certain type of unity, it has lost its real unity. (These types
of unity in the broken world are :

(i) Increased socialization of life: we are one and all treated as agents,
registered, enrolled, and we end by merging into our own identity
cards. (2) Extension of the powers of the State, which is like a searching
eye on all of us. (3) This world has lost its true unity probably
because privacy, brotherhood, creativeness, reflection and imagina
tion, are all increasingly discredited in it.

Therefore — it is of the very utmost urgency that we reflect, and
reflect upon reflection, in order to bring to light that exigence which
animates reflection (cf. Chapter III), and in order to show that this
exigence when at work transcends any sort of process whatever, and
sweeps beyond the opposition of the empiric ego and the universal
ego.

III. THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE page 39

What is the nature of this exigence, lying at the origin of philosophic
research (cf. Chapter I), and in danger of being smothered by the
broken world of techniques and socialization?

It is essentially an exigence of transcendence, this term being taken
in its traditional meaning, as opposed to immanence; its implication

[viii]

is that to transcend is not merely to go beyond, spatio-temporally (in
space or in time).

This exigence is existentially experienced as a non-satisfaction, but
all non-satisfaction does not entail an aspiring towards transcendence,
for there are non-satisfactions which crave the possession of a given
power, and which disappear, once this power is attained.

Another non-satisfaction occurs, or can occur, within possession;
another call comes from my innermost being, a call directed not out
wards but inwards. (This may be a call to create, and to create means
to create something higher than one's self.)

Transcendence is thus evoked as referring to man; but is not this
negating it, absorbing it into experience?

This objection takes for granted the figuration of experience as
being a sort of given element, more or less, without form; and it
ignores the impossibility of a representation of experience.

With the result that: not only can ' transcendent ' not mean ' trans
cendent of experience', but, if we are still to talk sense, we have to
admit that there must be an experience of the transcendent ; to experi
ence ... is not indeed to enfold into one's self, but to stretch out to
wards . . ., consciousness being always consciousness of someone else
than one's self.
• So that the exigence of transcendence is not the exigence to go

o o o

beyond all experience whatsoever, but to substitute one mode of
experience for another, or, more accurately still, to strive towards
an increasingly pure mode of experience.

IV. TRUTH AS A VALUE :

THE INTELLIGIBLE BACKGROUND page 57

What do we mean when we state that we are guided by a love of
truth, or that someone has sacrificed himself to ' the truth ' ? These
assertions are void of meaning if truth be defined as ' veritas est adequatio
rei et intellectus ' ; they make sense only if truth is value, for only in this
aspect can truth become a stake to be striven for.

Truth and Judgment. Are we to exclude from the problem sensation
and feeling, which seem indeed to be what they are on the hither side
of all judgment?

Yet a sensation (a taste, for example) is immediately recognizable,
which would seem to attest that it has a certain kernel of identity
which makes possible a consonance between me and someone else; so the
connoisseur does exist, in every domain, and the non-connoisseur, if
he recognizes himself as such, is ' in the truth ', because he does not
shut himself to a certain light. What is this light? Whence does it
come?

[ix]

Truth and Fact. There is no meaning in imagining that this light
emanates from facts taken in a grossly realistic sense, and that it
comes to us from outside.

There is not, indeed, exteriority of the fact as regards the subject;
the structure of the latter is an open structure, and the fact is, so to
speak, an integral part of it ; this is why the fact can become illumin-
ant, on condition that the subject so place himself in relation to the
fact that he receive the light radiated by it. So it is all between me
and me, the me of desire and the me ' spirit of truth ' (although
there are not two me's) and it is only as referred to this source, to this
living centre, that facts can be called illuminant.

It is therefore in the light of truth that we succeed in mastering
within us the permanent temptation to conceive or represent reality
as we would like it to be. Stimulating and purifying power of truth
which enables the subject to recognize reality; active recognition,
far distant, both from constraint and from pure spontaneity.

Truth cannot therefore be considered as a thing, or an object. A
conversation may be taken as an example, in which truth is at one and
the same time that towards which the speakers are conscious of
moving, and that which spurs them towards this goal.

Idea of a sort of ' intercourse' which takes place in an intelligible
medium, to which man perhaps belongs in one of his aspects (the
Platonic reminiscence). An idea which demonstrates that it is inad
missible to isolate a judgment and then look for the truth in connec
tion with this judgment.

V. PRIMARY & SECONDARY REFLECTION:
THE EXISTENTIAL FULCRUM .. page 77

Once we have the definition of the intelligible medium in which
philosophic thought evolves (unfolds itself), the question of the
relation between reflection and life inevitably comes up. It must be
said that, contrary to a thesis common amongst the romantic philoso
phers, this relation is not an opposition. Reflection occurs when, life
coming up against a certain obstacle, or again, being checked by a
certain break in the continuity of experience, it becomes necessary
to pass from one level to another, and to recover on this higher plane
the unity which had been lost on the lower one. Reflection appears in
this case as a promoter of life, it is ascendant and recuperatory, in that
it is secondary reflection as opposed to a primary reflection which is
still only decomposing or analytic.

It is on the question ' what am I? ' that philosophic reflection is
called upon to centre. None of the answers that fit under headings
(son of ... born at . . .) can be satisfactory here. Reflection discovers
that I am not, strictly speaking, someone in particular, but neither am

I purely and simply the negation of someone in particular. We must
find out how I can be both at once.

I am led to recognize that the me (ego) which I am, and which is
not someone, cannot be set down as either existent or imaginary.

Passage from this ambiguous and undecided situation to the fathom
ing of existence considered in its aspect of immediacy, not as the
predicate of /, but as an undecomposable totality. The fact of bein^
linked to my body is constitutive of my own existential quality.

Reflection is thus led to concentrate on my body as mine. Whereas
primary reflection, being purely analytical, treated this body as pure
object, linked with or parallel to another thing, another reality which
would be called the soul, secondary reflection recognizes in my body
a fundamental act of feeling which cannot amount to mere objective
possession nor to an instrumental relation, nor to something which
could be treated purely and simply as identity of the subject with the
object.

VI. FEELING AS A MODE OF

PARTICIPATION page 103

To recognize my body is to be led to question myself upon the act of
feeling; the act of feeling is linked with the fact that this body is mine.
What is the meaning of to feel ? How is it possible to feel ? To feel cannot
be reduced to an instrumental function, to a function made possible
by a given apparatus.

Sensation cannot be interpreted as a message emitted from X,
picked up and translated by Y. To feel is not a means by which two
stations can communicate with each other.

In fact: Any instrument presupposes my body. Any message pre
supposes a basis of sensation ; it cannot therefore give an account of it.
A non-mediatizable immediate must be brought in, an immediate
that I am.

It is this idea of participation that enables us to explain the act of
feeling and it is the act of feeling that is at the basis of the will to partici
pate.

Participation: at one extreme we are in the objective (to take my
share of a cake, for instance), at the other extreme all trace of
objectivity is gone (participation by prayer, sacrifice).

But on the other hand, the will to participate can only act on the
basis of a certain consensus, which is of the order of feeling.

Participation-feeling is beyond the traditional opposition of activity
and passivity; to feel is not to endure, but to receive (in the sense of
receiving into one's self — to receive willingly, to welcome, to
embrace), and to receive is an act.

There is, then, a difference between feeling and non-feeling, but

[xi]

this difference is probably beyond the grasp of the technician, who is
inclined to conceive the passing from the inert to the alive according
to the processes of fabrication.

The artist alone, the artist with eyes in his head, really participates
in the reality of life. Contemplation thus appears as a mode of partici
pation, the highest of all. The act oj feeling is then a mode of participa
tion, but participation exceeds the limits of feeling.

VII. BEING IN A SITUATION page 125

Contemplation is a mode of participation in which the oppositions
before (in front of) me and within me, outside and inside, are trans
cended. This being so, recollection is implicit in participation.
Recollection (which is not a mode of abstracting one's self) is an act
by means of which I over- pass (go beyond) these oppositions, and in
which the " turning inward to myself " and " the stretching outward
from myself" meet.

But recollection is not abstraction of one's self (from one's spatio-
temporal situation) ; the conditions of recollection are the very
conditions of the existence of the being whose circumstantial data
cannot appear as contingent.

My situation, my life, are not indeed an ensemble of things existing
in themselves, to which I am foreign or exterior, though neither can
I merge into them and consider them as a fatality or a destiny. In this
order the opposition of contingence and necessity must be over-passed
(gone beyond), as is shown in the examples of encounter (which is not
the objective intercrossing of casual series and which supposes
inferiority ) and vocation (which is not a constraint but a call) ; the
circumstantial data therefore only intervenes in connection with free
activity — called upon to recognize (know) itself in this free activity, that
is to say, open, permeable (without being strictly speaking influenci-
ble), and for which the non-contingence of the empirical ' given '
is a call to creative development.

VIII. 'MY LIFE' .. page 148

The question: who am I? remains.

Since it is not possible to count on a friend, a party, or a collectivity
to decide it for me, the question becomes an appeal (call), who am I?
Shall I not find the answer by enquiring into my own life?

My life can be considered from two standpoints, that of: i . The past.
2. That of the present, the fact that I am still living it.

i. In the past. My life appears to me as something that can, by
reason of its very essence, be narrated.

But to narrate is to unfold.

It is also to summarize, i.e., to totalize schematically.

[xii]

My life cannot then be reproduced by a narrative ; in as much as it
has been actually lived, it lies without the scope of my present con
crete thought and can only be recaptured as particles irradiated by
flashes of memory.

Nor is my life in the notes jotted down day by day and making up my
diary; when I re-read them they have for the most part lost their
meaning, and I do not recognize myself in them.

Nor is my work to be identified with my life; what judge could sift
from my work that which truly expresses me?

Finally my acts, in as much as they are recorded in objective reality,
do not tell of that within me which lies beyond them.

My life, in so far as already lived, is not then an inalterable deposit
or a finished whole.

2. In so far as I am still living it, my life appears to me as something
I can consecrate or sacrifice, and the more I feel that I am striving towards
an end, or serving a cause, the more alive (living) I feel. It is therefore
essential to life that it be articulated on a reality which gives it a
meaning and a trend, and, as it were, justifies it; this does not signify
that life is an available asset.

To give one's life is neither to part with one's self nor to do away
with one's self, it is to respond to a certain call. Death can then be
life, in the supreme sense.

My life is infinitely beyond the consciousness I have of it at any given
moment ; it is essentially unequal in itself, and transcendent of the
account that I am led to keep of its elements. Secondary reflection
alone can recuperate that which inhabits my life and which my life
does not express.

IX. TOGETHERNESS: IDENTITY AND

DEPTH page 1 7 1

My life eludes itself; this being so, should we not say that man is con
demned to act a part in a play he has not read, or to improvise without
an outline of the plot? Should we not deny that life has a meaning or
a trend?

Life is not something found in our path (such as a purse, for
example) and of which we decide or not to avail ourselves.

Awareness of one's self as living is indeed to be aware of a former
existence, and the role of reflection is here to recognize the prior
participation with a reality which consciousness cannot encompass.

This going beyond the consciousness of self is met with particularly
in two directions: in relation to others, in relation to one's self.

i . Relation to others. Consciousness of self occurs only in the
following behaviours: pretentiousness, aggressiveness, humility, i.e.,
when the living link connecting me and another is broken by over
passing the / and him opposition.

[xiii]

The ego is the more itself the more it is with the other and not
- directed at itself.

2. Relation to one's self. The consciousness of self appears as the
breaking of the inner city the ego forms with itself, with its past.

Here again it is intersubjectivity that is first.

My life is then on the far side of the oppositions : I and someone
else, unity and plurality.

Abstract identity and historic becoming. It can only be thought from
an angle of depth, where the now and the then, the near and the far, meet.

X. PRESENCE AS A MYSTERY

pag

The link of my life with t\\2 depths of time is an introduction to the
mystery of family.

Taken from the angle of depth, my life no longer appears as the
terminus of various biological series, but as an endowment; the
kinship between father and son therefore implies a mutual recognition,
and the impossibility of dissociating the vital from the spiritual, for the
spiritual is only such on condition that it be bodied forth.

The articulation of the vital and the spiritual, the common thesis
of the lectures of the first series, itself brings in the knowledge of
mystery.

This knowledge supposes :

i . The distinction between object and presence.
2. The criticism of the notion of problem.

1. With the object, material communications are maintained
without intercommunication : the object is entirely before (in front
of) the subject, which thus becomes another object.

The being who is present can on the contrary be neither invoked
nor evoked ; it reveals the other to himself at the same time as it
reveals itself to him.

2. The object can then supply information, bring solutions to
problems put regarding it.

The being who is present transcends all possible enquiry, and in
this sense is mysterious.

Philosophical research is articulated on mystery.

We must therefore conclude on the link between reflection, and
presence, and mystery in the trans-historic depth of life.

Mystery coincides with this region of depth which, perhaps, opens
out on to eternity.

RRATUM : p. 2oo, 1. 4, for to make read to do with

[xiv]

REFLECTION & MYSTERY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

FIRST of all, and very sincerely and heartily, I would like to
thank the University of Aberdeen for my appointment. As
Gifford Lecturer here, I am following in the footsteps of many
other thinkers, representing various national cultures, all men of
honourable note in the history of philosophy ; and as I prepare to
make my own contribution, I cannot help being overcome by a
feeling almost of awe. Also, of course, I have to get over a certain
initial diffidence; is it not a little futile, really, and more than a
little rash, to set out to expound one more philosophical doctrine,
when there are so many philosophical doctrines already? I fancy
that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the
grounds of his thinking to be, does harbour, somewhere deep
down in him, a sceptic — a sceptic to whom the history of philo
sophy looks rather like the solemn setting up of rows of ninepins,
so that they may be neatly knocked down ! That way of looking
at things is tempting, no more ; it is tempting, and for philosophy
it is in a sense the temptation — just as for man in general suicide
is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.

The fact is, moreover, that something systematic ; something
which would be, strictly speaking, mj system; some organic
whole of which I could, in successive lectures, anatomize the
structural details, pointing out its superiorities, to name only
two of my most distinguished forerunners, to the systems of
Bergson and Whitehead — all that is just what I do not intend to
lay before you. When I called these lectures a search for, or an
investigation into, the essence of spiritual reality, I was not
choosing words at random. From my point of view such a term
as search or investigation — some term implying the notion of a
quest — is the most adequate description that can be applied to the
essential direction of philosophy. Philosophy will always, to my

way of thinking, be an aid to discovery rather than a matter o£
strict demonstration. And, if pressed, I would expand that ; I think
the philosopher who first discovers certain truths and then sets
out to expound them in their dialectical or systematic inter
connections always runs the risk of profoundly altering the nature
of the truths he has discovered.

Furthermore, I will not disguise from you the fact that when
I had been nominated by the University of Aberdeen to deliver
the Gifford Lectures. in 1949 and 19^0, my first reaction was a
feeling of intense inner disturbance. The honour that was being
done to me faced me with a serious personal problem. Was I not,
in fact, being asked to do something which it had been my con
stant determination not to do : namely, to present in a systematic
form material which, I repeat, has always remained for me at the
stage of a quest ?

All the same, I could not help considering this nomination
as a call upon me. And it has always been my conviction that,
however unexpected such calls might be, I ought to respond to
them with such strength and skill as I possess — always supposing
that they are made by somebody who recognizes the validity of
the kind of demand that has always seemed valid to me. The
principle does not apply, obviously enough, to the appeals that
may be made to one by journalists or fashionable hostesses, once
one's name has begun to make a certain noise in the world. I am

o

thinking, for instance, of somebody who asked me, a few months
ago, to squeeze the core of my philosophy into a couple of sen
tences. That sort of thing is just silly, and must be answered with
a shrug of the shoulders. But on the present occasion, I had the
feeling from the first that I could not reject such an offer without
becoming guilty of what would be, from my own point of view,
an indefensible betrayal.

At the same time, it was clear to me that in answering this
call I must continue to respect the specific character of what has
always been my own line of development. And, of course, those
who made this offer to me would have that line of development
in view. Nobody who had any direct knowledge of my writings
would dream of expecting from me an exposition in the deductive
manner, the logical linking together of a body of essential

propositions. My task, therefore, was to try to satisfy whatever
expectations I might have aroused, without, however, straining
myself to stretch my thought on the procrustean bed of some
kind of systematic dogmatism : without, indeed, taking any
account at all of whatever modes may prevail at the moment in
certain schools of philosophy, without trying to square myseli
with the Hegelian or the Thomist tradition, for instance. If I was
able to accept this offer, and if in the end I felt that I ought to
accept it, the reason was that what was being asked of me was,
at bottom, merely this: that I should be, that I should remain
myself. Now to be oneself, to remain oneself is a trickier matter
than most people think. There are always gaps in our personal
experience and our personal thought, and there exists a permanent
temptation to stop these up with ready-made developments
borrowed from some body of pre-existing doctrine. It would be
very presumptuous of me to assume that, at certain points, this
particular weakness will not come to light in the course of these
lectures.

Given all this, my task, as I repeat, could not be that of
expounding some system which might be described as Marcelism
— the word rings in my ears with a mocking parodic note ! — but
rather to recapitulate the body of my work under a fresh light,
to seize on its joints, its hinges, its articulations, above all to
indicate its general direction. And here I would ask your per
mission to use a metaphor; I shall need such permission more
than once, for I share the belief of Henri Bergson in the philo
sophical value of some kinds of metaphor, those which may be
described as structural. The image that imposes itself on me is
that of a road. It is just, so it seems to me, as if I had so far been
following what tracks there were across a country that appeared
to me to be largely unexplored, and as if you had asked me to
construct a main road in the place of these interrupted paths, or
perhaps rather — but it comes to the same thing — to draw up a
sort of itinerary.

The metaphor is open to objections of two sorts.

It might be said in the first place that a road implies space ;
and that the notion of space is something from which a meta
physical investigation, as such, must abstract. One must make the

[3]

simple answer that if my metaphor must be rejected on this
count, so must every kind of discursive thinking; for it is all too
evident that the notion of discursiveness implies, and rests on, a
simple physical image like that of walking along a road. Moreover,
we shall later on have occasion to recognize the existence and

O

philosophical rights of a sort of spatiality which might be called
the spatiality of inner experience ; and it may be that this spatiality
of inner experience is coextensive with the whole spiritual life.

But the objection may be put in another way, which has a
dangerous look of being much more genuinely awkward. To lay
down a road in a place where at first there were only tracks, is
that not equivalent to fixing in advance a certain destination at
which one intends to arrive, and must not that destination, itself,
be very exactly located? The underlying image would be that of a
grotto, a mine, or a sanctuary whose whereabouts one knew in
advance. It would be a matter of showing the way there to those
who for one reason or another wanted to have a look at the place,
no doubt in order to profit from its riches. But does not this
presuppose that the result we are working for has already been
achieved, even before we start working for it : does it not pre
suppose a preliminary or original discovery of the grotto or the
sanctuary? Well, looking at the matter in my own way, I must
ask whether, in the realm of philosophy, we can really talk about
results? Is not all such talk based on a misunderstanding; of the
specific character of a philosophical investigation, as such? The
question raised here at least obliges us to come to much closer
grips \vith the very notion of a result.

Let us take the case of a chemist who has invented and set
going some process for obtaining or extracting a substance which,
before his time, could only be got hold of in a much more costly
and complicated fashion. It is obvious, in this case, that the result
of the invention will hav e a sort of separate existence, or, at all
events, that we shall be quite within our rights in treating it as if
it had. If I need the substance — let us say it is some pharmaceutical
product — I will go to the shop, and I will not need to know that
it is thanks to the invention of the chemist in question that I am
able to procure it easily. In my purely practical role as customer
and consumer, I may have no occasion even to learn that there

[4]

has been such an invention unless for some out-of-the-way reason ;
let us say, because a factory has been destroyed and the invention
has temporarily ceased to be put into operation. The pharmacist
may then tell me that the product is out of stock, or is not to be
had at its usual price and quality, but let us get it quite clear that
in the ordinary run of affairs the existence of this chemical process
will be known only to specialists or to those who are moving in
the direction of specialization. Here wre have a very simple
example indeed of what sort of life a result may lead, cut apart
from the methods by which it was achieved. And one could go
on to mention many other examples ; it is not necessary that a
result should always embody itself, as in the instance I have given,
as a material commodity. Think of some astronomical forecast,
say of a coming eclipse. We welcome that, we make it our own,
without bothering ourselves much about the extremely compli
cated calculations on which it is founded, and knowing quite well
that our own mathematical equipment is not sufficient to allow
us to do these sums over again in our own heads.

o

One might note here, in passing, that in our modern world,
because of its extreme technical complication, we are, in fact,
condemned to take for granted a great many results achieved
through long research and laborious calculations, research and
calculations of which the details are bound to escape us.

One might postulate it as a principle, on the other hand,
that in an investigation of the type on which we are now engaged,
a philosophical investigation, there can be no place at all for
results of this sort. Let us expand that: between a philosophical
investigation and its final outcome, there exists a link which can
not be broken without the summing up itself immediately losing
all reality. And of course we must also ask ourselves here just
what we mean, in this context, by reality.

We can come to the same conclusions starting from the
other end. We can attempt to elucidate the notion of philoso
phical investigation directly. Where a technician, like the chemist,
starts off with some very general notion, a notion given in advance
of what he is looking for, what is peculiar to a philosophical
investigation is that the man who undertakes it cannot possess
anything equivalent to that notion given in advance of what he is

is]

looking for. It would not, perhaps, be imprecise to say that he
starts off at random ; I am taking care not to forget that this has
been sometimes the case with scientists themselves, but a
scientific result achieved, so to say, by a happy accident acquires
a kind of purpose when it is viewed retrospectively ; it looks as if
it had tended towards some strictly specific aim. As we go on we
shall gradually see more and more clearly that this can never be
the case with philosophic investigation.

On the other hand, when we think of it, we realize that our
mental image of the technician — of the scientist, too, for at this
level the distinction between the two of them reaches vanishing
point — is that of a man perpetually carrying out operations, in
his own mind or with physical objects, which anybody could
carry out in his place. The sequence of these operations, for that
reason, can be schematized in universal terms. I am abstracting
here from the mental gropings which are inseparable, in the
individual scientist's history, from all periods of discovery. These
gropings are like the useless roundabout routes taken by a raw
tourist in a country with which he has not yet made himself
familiar. Both are destined to be dropped and forgotten, for good
and all, once the traveller knows the lie of the land.

The greatness and the limitation of scientific discovery
consist precisely in the fact that it is bound by its nature to be
lost in anonymity. Once a result has been achieved, it is bound
to appear, if not a matter of chance, at least a matter of contin-
gence, that it should have been this man and not that man who
discovered such and such a process. This retrospective view of the
matter is probably in some degree an illusion, but the illusion is
itself inseparable from the general pattern of scientific research.
From the point of view of technical progress, there is no point in
considering the concrete conditions in which some discovery was
actually able to be made, the personal, the perhaps tragic back
ground from which the discovery, as such, detaches itself; from
the strictly technical point of view all that background is, obviously
and inevitably, something to be abstracted from.

But this is not and cannot be true in the same way for the
kind of investigation that will be presented in the course of these

[6]

lectures ; and it is essential to see exactly why not. How can we
start out on a search without having somehow anticipated what
we are searching for? Here, again, it is necessary to make
certain distinctions. The notion given in advance, the scientist's
or technician's notion, which in a philosophical investigation we
must exclude, has to do, in fact, with a certain way of acting: the
problem is how to set about it so that some mode of action which
is at the moment impracticable, or at least can only be carried
out in unsatisfactory and precarious conditions, should become
practicable according to certain pre-established standards of
practicability (standards of simplicity, of economy, and so on).
Let us add, in addition, as a development of what has previously
been said, that this mode of action should be of a sort that can be
carried out by anybody, at least by anybody within a certain
determinable set of conditions, anybody, for instance, equipped
with certain indispensable tools.

It is probably not sufficient for my purpose merely to say
that, where a metaphysical investigation is being undertaken, a
result of this sort, the arrival at a practicable mode of action
within certain determinable conditions, cannot be calculated on
in advance, and that in fact the very idea of a metaphysical
investigation necessarily excludes the possibility of this kind of
practical result. For I might also add that the inaptitude of the
run of men for metaphysics, particularly in our own period, is
certainly bound up with the fact that they find it impossible to
conceive of a purpose which lies outside the order of the practical,
\vhich cannot be translated into the language of action.

To get a clearer insight into the matter we must make a real
effort to get a more exact definition of the point of departure of
this other type of investigation — our own type. I have written
somewhere that metaphysical unease is like the bodily state of a
man in a fever who will not lie still but keeps shifting around in
his bed looking for the right position. But how does this really
apply? What does the word 'position' signify here? We should
not let ourselves be too much hampered by the spatial character
of the metaphor; or, if we are, it can be helped out by another —
that of discords in music, with which the ear cannot rest satisfied,

[7]

but which must be resolved by being transcended in a wider
harmony. Let us see if this notion of resolution can be of some
use to us here.

Interpreting it in the most general way, we can say that this
idea of resolution, of the resolving of discords or contradictions,
is that of the passage from a situation in which we are ill at ease
to one in which we feel ourselves almost melting away with relief.
The general notion of a situation is one which is destined to play
a great part in my lectures, and I have my reasons for first bringing
it to your notice at this point. It will be only much later on that
we shall grasp its full significance. For the moment, let us be
content to say that a situation is something in which I find myself
involved ; but that however we interpret the notion of the involved
self, the situation is not something which presses on the self
merely from the outside, but something which colours its interior
states ; or rather we shall have to ask ourselves whether, at this
level of discourse, the usual antithesis between inner and outer is
not beginning to lose a good deal of its point. The only point that
I want, however, to emphasize at this moment is that a philo
sophical investigation, of the sort in which we are now engaged,
can be considered as a gathering together of the processes by
which I can pass from a situation which is experienced as basically
discordant, a situation in which I can ?o so far as to sav that I am

o J

at war with myself, to a different situation in which some kind of
expectation is satisfied.

This is still all pretty vague, but already, I am afraid, it begins
to raise awkward questions, all centering round this indetermin
ate notion of the involved self, of my involved self, which I have
been forced to take as my reference-point. The really important
question that is raised may be framed in the following terms : is
there not a risk of the investigation that is being undertaken here
reducing itself to an account of the succession of stages by which
I, I as this particular person, Gabriel Marcel, attempt, starting
off from some state of being which implies a certain suffering, to
reach another state of being which not only does not imply
suffering but may be accompanied by a certain joy? But what
guarantee can I have that this personal progress of mine has any
thing more than a subjective value? Nevertheless, in the end is it

[8]

not the case that something more than subjective value is needed
to confer on any chain of thoughts what I may describe as a proper
philosophic dignity? In other words, are there any means at all of
assuring ourselves whether this indeterminate involved self, which
I have been forced to take as my reference-point, is or is not, for
instance, immortal?

In this connection, some remarks which I have previously
made might be of a kind to arouse a certain uneasiness. Have I not
seemed to reserve the privilege of universality in thinking to
scientists or technicians whose method is that of a series of
operations which can be carried out by anybody else in the world
who is placed in the same setting and can make use of similar
tools?

The answer to this very important question will only clarify
itself very gradually, as our thoughts about it work back upon
themselves. I think it necessary, nevertheless, to indicate even
at this moment — partly to allay a very understandable nervousness
— in what direction the answer ought to be sought for.

Let us say, to put it very roughly, that the dilemma in which
this question leaves us — that of choice between the actual indi
vidual man, delivered over to his own states of being and incapable
of transcending them, and a kind of generalized thinking as such,
what the Germans call Denken uberhaupt, which would be opera
tive in a sort of Absolute and so claim universal validity for its
operations — let us say that this dilemma is a false one, and must
be rejected. Between these two antithetic terms, we must
intercalate an intermediary type of thinking, wrhich is precisely
the type of thinking that the lecture following this will illustrate.
The point should at once be made here that, even outside the
limits of philosophy properly so called, there are incontestable
examples of this type of thinking. We have only to think, for
instance, of what we describe, rather vaguely indeed, as the
understanding of works of art; it would be better no doubt, in
this connection, to talk of their appreciation — so long as we
eliminate from that word its root reference to a pretium, a market
price. It would be an illusion and even an absurdity to suppose
that the Missa Solemnis or some great work of pictorial art is
meant for just anybody who comes along; on the contrary, we

[9]

must in honest sincerity accept the fact that there are plenty of
people whose attention is not arrested, and who have nothing
communicated to them, by such wrorks. It is none the less
certain that when a genuine emotion is felt at the impact of a
work of art it infinitely transcends the limits of what we call the
individual consciousness. Let us try to clarify this in more detail.

When I look at or listen to a masterpiece, I have an exper
ience which can be strictly called a revelation. That experience
will just not allow itself to be analysed away as a mere state of
simple strongly felt satisfaction. One of the secondary purposes,
indeed, of these lectures will be to look into the question of how
we ought to understand such revelations. On the other hand, it is
just as incontestably a fact that, for reasons that remain impene
trable to us — if it is right to talk at all about reasons in this
connection — such revelations appear not to be granted to other
people, people with whom, nevertheless, I have no difficulty at
all in communicating on other topics. There would be no point
in bringing into play my stores of learning, let me even say my
gifts as a teacher ; I would never succeed in exciting, in the other
person, the thrill of admiration that the great work of art had
excited in me. It is just as if the other person were, in the root
sense of the word, refractory — one who repels the particles of
light — or as if a kind of grace that is operative for me were not
operative for him.

The existence of such absolute disparity has something quite
indecent about it in a \vorld where the counting of heads has
become not only a legal fact but a moral standard. We have got
into the habit of thinking statistically, and to do so, at this level,
is at bottom to admit that anything which cannot accumulate
enough votes in its favour ought not to be taken into considera
tion, does not count. Obviously, in those parts of the world
which have not yet come under the totalitarian yoke, this pecu
liar logic has not had all its implications worked out. The statis
tical method is, as it were, dumped down well outside the gates
of the palace of art, but for how long? It is permissible, at least,
to ask whether in this realm, as in many others, the totalitarian
countries, with their brutal way of freezing out the nonconform-
ing artist, have not merely confined themselves to drawing the

[10]

proper conclusions from premises that are, in fact, accepted by
everybody for whom statistics provide a sufficient criterion for
the administration of human affairs.

Yet if the conclusions are logical, it may be that the role of
the free critical thinker in our time is to swim against the current
and attack the premises themselves. That is not our task, here
and now: but we must state, simply and flatly, that there do exist
ranges of human experience where a too literal, an over-simpli
fied way of conceiving the criterion of universality just cannot be
accepted. And, of course, there are still a good many countries in
which the idea of taking a referendum on artistic or religious
questions would be greeted with hoots of laughter. Let us under
stand each other : for those who want to study taste and opinion,
over a set period, in a given country, the existence of such things
as Gallup polls is obviously useful ; but there are still a good many
people who wrould refuse to postulate it as a principle that current
tastes and opinions, for those countries, ought to have the force
of law. The step from 'Such is the case, quite generally' to 'Such
ought to be the case, universally' is an obvious non sequitur, and
that is what matters to us. We ought, in addition, to go on to a
very careful analysis of what kind of question is really susceptible
of being the subject of a referendum. We would then be led to
ask if, apart from questions that can be answered by a simple
'Yes' or 'No', there are not other infinitely more vital questions
which are literally incapable of embodying themselves in the
general consciousness. Of these questions, the most important
are those which present themselves to the philosopher as the
first that have to be answered — though first here must not, of
course, be understood in a strictly chronological sense. The
philosopher, of necessity, has begun by asking himself the ordin
ary questions ; and it is only at the cost of an effort of reflective
thought, which really constitutes a very painful discipline, that he
has raised himself up from the level of the first type of question,
the type that everybody asks, to the level of the second, the type
proper to philosophy. But I am still drawing the picture with
very crude strokes and in very rough outline. A particular
example may make it easier to understand what I am getting at.

The question, 'Do you believe in God?' is one of those

which, according to the common belief, can be answered by a
simple 'Yes' or 'No'. But a deeper analysis would enable us to
lay bare the invariably illusory character of these answers. There
is a mass of people who imagine that they believe in God, when in
fact they are bowing down to an idol to whom any decent theology
whatever would undoubtedly refuse the name of God; and on
the other hand there are many others who believe themselves to
be atheists because they conceive of God only as an idol to be
rejected, and who yet reveal in their acts, which far transcend
their professed opinions, a totally inarticulate religious belief.
It follows from all this that the answer to a referendum on the
question, 'Do you believe in God?' ought to be in the great
majority of cases, 'I don't know whether I believe in God or not
— and I am not even quite sure that I know wrhat "believing in
God" is'. Note, carefully, the contrast between these formulae
and those of the agnosticism of the last century: 'I don't know
whether there is a God or not'.

Proceeding along these lines we should be brought, undoubt
edly, to a definition of the philosopher as the man who asks
the true questions. But obviously this formula itself raises a
difficulty. The true questions, I have said: true from whose point
of view? Or rather, can we give a meaning to the adjective 'true',
as it is used here, without bringing in the problem of the point
of view of the person to whom the 'true question' is addressed?
There is no difficulty, at least in principle, in knowing what the
words 'true answer' might mean: 'true questions' are another
matter. Perhaps we might bring in Plato's wonderful comparison
of the philosophic questioner to the skilful carver. There is a
right and a wrong way of carving. But we must take care ; the
real carver, to whom the philosophic questioner is compared, is
exercising his skill on a given structure, let us say the bones of a
fowl. Our own skill, in these lectures, has to be exercised on
something much less palpable and solid ; perhaps not on a struc
ture at all exactly, except possibly in the sense, itself metaphor
ical, in which we refer to the structure of a play or a poem. From
this point of view, the comparison loses much of its aptness.
Could we say that the philosopher is a kind of locksmith to whom
we turn when we want to open some particular door? Even this

[12]

is much too simple. In this case door, keyhole, lock, are not
given. The task of philosophy, to my mind, consists precisely in
this sort of reciprocal clarification of two unknowns, and it may
well be that, in order to pose the true questions, it is actually
necessary to have an intuition, in advance, about what the true
answers might be. It might be said that the true questions are those
which point, not to anything resembling the solution of an enigma,
but rather to a line of direction along which we must move. As we

o

move along the line, we get more and more chances of being
visited by a sort of spiritual illumination; for wre shall have to
acknowledge that Truth can be considered only in this way, as a
spirit, as a light.

It goes without saying that we are here touching on a prob
lem that is going to take up much of our time during this first
series of lectures. It is impossible to say anything about the essence
of the spiritual life unless one has first succeeded in making it
clear what is to be understood by the term 'truth', or at the very
least in ascertaining whether the term is one of those which can

o

be univocally defined: that is, defined as having one, and only
one, proper meaning, indifferently applicable at all levels of
discourse.

So far, it does not seem that all these preliminary points we
have been making yet allow us to discern very clearly on whose
behalf our investigations are being pursued. I have spoken of an
audience that would act as an intermediary between the enclosed
subjective self, at one pole of an antithesis, and the generalized
thinking of science, with its claims to quite universal validity, at
another. I illustrated this middle position from the fine arts, and
the way in which they are really understood by some and not
understood at all by others ; but that illustration does not yet
let me see very clearly what set of people this audience might be ;
and the references to religious belief with which I followed up

O i

that illustration may seem to plunge us into even deeper obscurity.
What! must I make my appeal, at this point, to an audience of
connoisseurs'? I am using the word in the same sense in which it is
used in artistic circles. Let us stop for a moment, and think about
it. The notion of being a connoisseur seems inseparable from that
of having a kind of tact or, more exactly, a sensory refinement —

[13]

a very clear example, for instance, is the really discriminating
diner : I am thinking of the kind of expert who can distinguish
not only between two very similar wines from neighbouring
vineyards, but between two successive years' bottlings from the
same vineyard, by means of subleties that escape the untrained
palate. It should be all too clear that the point of view of a
connoisseur of this sort is not that at which we should place
ourselves if \ve wish to understand, that is, to take upon ourselves
or more accurately to develop within ourselves, the philosophical
investigations that will be the subject of these lectures. I would
be inclined to say that the audience I am looking for must be dis
tinguished less by a certain kind of aptitude (like, for instance,
the discriminating diner's aptitude) than by the level at which
they make their demands on life and set their standards.

We shall have to ask ourselves many questions about the
nature of reflective thought and about its metaphysical scope.
But from the very start we should note how necessary it will be to
be suspicious, I will not say of words themselves, but of the
images that words call up in us. I cannot enter here into the
terribly difficult problem of the nature of language; but, from
the very beginning of our investigations, we should bear in mind
how often it seems to get tied up in knots — or I would rather say
in clots, like clots in the bloodstream, which impede the free
motion of thought: for that motion, if it is allowed its natural
flow, is also a circulation. We get these clots because words
become charged with passion and so acquire a taboo-value. The
thinking which dares to infringe such taboos is considered, if not
exactly as sacrilegious, at least as a kind of cheating, or even as
something worse. Obviously, it is particularly today in the
political realm that this sort of thing is noticeable. The term
'democracy', for instance, is one which does block our thinking
in a lamentable way. A concrete example of this tendency is the
fact that anybody who wants to examine the notion of democracy
from a detached point of view is liable to be called a fascist— as if
fascism itself were not just Jem^cra^y^vvTiIcriTiad taken the wrong
turning. But the man who stopped short in his thinking for fear of
having such labels as 'fascist' stuck on him would be inexcusable;
and if we are really inspired by that philosophical intention, whose

nature I have been trying to make clear, it is certain that we shall
be no longer able to feel such fears, or at least we shall be no
longer able to take them into consideration. At a first glance,
then, it seems that one thing we need for our task is a certain

o

courage, a courage in following out the course of our thoughts
where it leads us, a mental courage, about which common
experience allows us to say definitely that it is infinitely less
widely diffused than physical courage is ; and it will be of the
utmost importance to ask ourselves why this should be so. For
it ought to be a matter of total indifference to me to hear myself

o J

called 'fascist' if I know that this accusation rests on an obvious
misunderstanding, and even that, at bottom, my antagonist's
readiness to make such accusations implies the existence in his
mind of some attitudes which are really rather close to that fascist
spirit which he pretends to discern in me.

Obviously, this is only an illustration : but it is of set purpose,
in this first lecture, that I am multiplying references to various
levels of human interest, the technical, the scientific, the artistic,
the religious, the political; I want to underline the extremely
general scope of the investigations to which all these remarks are
leading on.

Now, what exactly lies behind this claim of ours, this refusal,
at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked?
What lies behind it is, I think, the philosophical intention seized
in its purity; that intention is quite certainly inseparable from
what we are accustomed to call freedom. But, as we shall see,
freedom is one of these words which need to have their meanings
very carefully elucidated; there can be no doubt that, in our own
period, the common uses of the word are often very unconsidered
and very indiscreet. Let us say simply that if philosophic thought
is free thought, it is free first of all in the sense that it does not
want to let itself be influenced by any prejudging of any issue.
But this notion of prejudice must be here taken in its widest
range of application. It is not only from social, political, and
religious prejudice that philosophical thinking must be enfran
chised, but also from a group of prejudices which seem to make
one body with itself, and which, one might say, it has a natural
tendency to secrete. I would not hesitate to say, for instance,

that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been ex
pounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests
very largely on prejudices of this sort, and it is obvious that our
thinking finds great difficulty in detaching itself from such
prejudices. To employ a rather trivial comparison, I would
readily admit that philosophy, when she engages in this struggle
with the prejudices that are, in a sense, natural to her, must at
moments have the impression that she is beginning to tear off
her own skin and to immolate herself in a kind of bleeding and
unprotected fleshy covering. That metaphor, like so many of the
metaphors I have used, is inadequate. Might one not say that in
ridding herself of her natural idealistic prejudices, philosophy
must, if she looks at the matter from a high moral point of view,
fear that she is betraying her own nature, showing herself unfaith
ful to her proper standards, and assuming in their place the impure,
contradictory, vile standards of a renegade, and all this without
there being, at a first glance, any visible counterbalancing advan
tages ? I remember very \vell the periods of anguish through which
I passed, more than thirty years ago now, when I was waging, in
utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of
something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but
upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face.

We shall have to return to this mysterious need, and to
expatiate upon it, since it is this need which I am attempting to
satisfy in some degree in the course of these lectures, and since
it is in danger of appearing completely meaningless to anyone who
does not feel it in the depths of his own nature. But at the
moment, I would say just this: at bottom, this need is not very
different from aood will, as that phrase is understood in the
Gospels.

It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own
day the notion of 'the man of good will' has lost much of its old
richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic
reverberations. But there is not any notion that is more in need
of reinstatement in our modern world. Let the Gospel formula
mean 'Peace to men of good will', or 'Peace through men of good
will', as one might often be tempted to think it did, in either
case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between

[16]

good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be
too much underlined. Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts
to the same thing, in the conditions which permit peace to be
assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which
allows us to describe it as specifically a good will. 'Content',
however, is not quite the word I want here. I think, rather, that
the goodness is a matter of a certain wray of asserting the will, and
on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which,
in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether that is war
in men's hearts or what we would call 'real war', must be regard
ed as intrinsically evil. We can speak then of men of good wrill
or peacemakers, indifferently. Of course, as we go on, these
notions will have to be made more exact and worked out in more
detail, and I dare to harbour the hope that our investigations will
not be without their usefulness if they allow us to make some
contribution towards such a clarifying process.

Thus, in seeking to determine for what set of people this
work of ours can be intended, we have arrived at a distinction
between those who feel a certain inner intellectual need, not
unrelated to the more widespread inner moral need, felt by men
of good will, to seek peace and ensue it, and those who do not;
this distinction needs to be g;one into more deeply. And it is a
distinction, as we shall see in the next lecture, that has to be
defined in relation to a certain general way of looking at the
world.

•7]

CHAPTER II

A BROKEN WORLD

BEFORE pressing further forward, I feel it necessary to go
back a little, to consider certain objections that will have
undoubtedly occurred to many of my listeners.

I assert that an investigation of the sort in which we are
engaged, an investigation of an eminently theoretical kind, can
appeal only to minds of a certain sort, to minds that have already
a special bias. Is there not something strange and almost shocking
in such an assertion? Does it not imply a perversion of the very
notion of truth? The ordinary idea of truth, the normal idea 01
truth, surely involves a universal reference — what is true, that
is to say, is true for anybody and everybody. Are we not risking
a great deal in wrenching apart, in this way, the two notions of
the true and the universally valid? Or more exactly, in making this
distinction, are we not substituting for the notion of truth some
other notion — some value which may have its place in the prac
tical, the moral, or the aesthetic order, but for which truth is not
the proper term?

Later in this course of lectures we shall have to look very
deeply into the meaning, or meanings, of the word 'truth', but
we have not yet reached a stage where such an investigation would
have practical use. We must at this stage simply attempt to
disentangle, to lay bare the presupposition which is implied in
this objection, and to ask ourselves what this presupposition, as a
postulate, is really worth. What the objection implies, in fact, is
that we know in advance, and perhaps even know in a quite
schematic fashion, what the relation between the self and the
truth it recognizes must be.

In the last two or three centuries, and indeed since much
more remote periods, there has been a great deal of critical
reflection on the subject of truth. Nevertheless, there is every

[18]

reason to suppose that, in our everyday thinking, we remain
dominated by an image of truth as something extracted — extrac
ted, or smelted out, exactly as a pure metal is extracted from a
mixed ore. It seems obvious to us that there are universally
effective smelting processes : or, more fundamentally, that there
are established, legitimate ways of arriving at truth ; and we have
a confused feeling that the man who steps aside from these ways,
or even from the idea of these ways, is in danger of losing himself
in a sort of no man's land where the difference between truth
and error — even between reality and dream — tends to vanish
away. It is, however, this very image of truth as something
smelted out that we must encounter critically if we want to
grasp clearly the gross error on which it rests. What we must
above all reject is the idea that we are forced to make a choice
between a genuine truth (so to call it) which has been extracted,
and a false, a lying truth which has been fabricated. Both horns of
this dilemma, it should be noted, are metaphorically modelled on
physical processes; and there is, on the face of it, every reason
to suppose that the subtle labour involved in the search for truth
cannot ever be properly assimilated to such physical manipula
tions of physical objects. But truth is not a thing-, whatever
definition we may in the end be induced to give to the notion of

J o

truth, we can affirm even now that truth is not a physical object,
that the search for truth is not a physical process, that no general
izations that apply to physical objects and processes can apply also
to truth.

Teaching, or rather certain traditional inadequate ways of
conceiving the teacher's function, have encouraged the general
acceptance of such gross images of truth. In Dickens 's novel,
Hard Times, there is a character called Mr. Gradgrind, for whom
anybody and everybody can be treated as a vessel capable of
containing truths (such as, 'The horse is a graminivorous quad
ruped') extracted from the crude ore of experience, divided,
and evenly dealt out. Mr. Gradgrind is aware, certainly, that one
vessel is not so sound as another; some are leaky, some are fragile,
and so on ... I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that the
educational system, even in countries that think of themselves as
rather advanced, has still something in common with the coarse-

['9]

ness and absurdity of Dickens 's satirical picture of it. The inter
esting question is, under what conditions does this illusory image
of truth as a physical substance, even as the stuff contained in a
vessel, present itself naturally to the mind? It is obvious that the
use of fixed forms of words in teaching plays a prominent part
in fostering the illusion. A history teacher, for instance, has to
din dates into his pupils. They have to give back just what they
have been given, unchanged by any mental process, and they
have to memorize the dates in a quite mechanical way. It is very
natural in this case to think of the pupil as a vessel, into which a
certain measure of liquid is poured, so that it may be poured out
again ; an even apter metaphor would be that of the gramophone
record. Such metaphors, however, cease to apply in the case
where, having explained some idea to a pupil, I ask him to
explain it back to me in his own words and if possible with his
own illustrations ; the idea certainly may still be thought of as a
content, but it is a content that has to be grasped by the intelli
gence; it cannot be reduced, like the history master's dates, to
some exact, particular formula. It is this irreducibility that we
must keep a grip on if we want to get beyond the illusory image
of truth as a physical object, a substance, the contents of a vessel,
a mere thing, and to recognize the impossibility of adequately
representing by material images those processes by which I can
both conceive a true proposition and affirm it to be true.

But perhaps there is a principle that wre can already postulate
(though reserving our right to expatiate more largely on this
important topic at a later stage). The principle is this. On the
one hand, everything that can be properly called technique is
comparable to a kind of manipulation, if not always necessarily of
physical objects, at least of mental elements (mathematical
symbols would be an example) comparable in some respects to
physical objects; and I suggest on the other hand, that the validity
for anybody and everybody, which has been claimed for truth, is
certainly deeply implied (though even here, subject to certain
provisos) in the very notion of technique, as wre have conceived
that notion here. Subject to certain provisos, I say, since every
technical manipulation, even the simplest, implies the possession
by the manipulator of certain minimal aptitudes, without which

[20]

it is not practicable. There is a story, for instance, that I often
tell, of how I had to pass an examination in physics which in
cluded, as a practical test, an experiment to determine one of the
simpler electrical formulae — I forget which now, let us say the
laws of electrolysis — and I found myself quite incapable of joining
up my wires properly; so no current came through. All I could
do was write on my paper, 'I cannot join up my wires, so there is
no current; if there were a current, it would produce such and
such a phenomenon, and I would deduce . . .' My own clumsi
ness appeared to me, and it must have appeared to the examiner,
as a purely contingent fact. It remains true in principle that any
body and everybody can join up the wires, enable the current to
pass through, and so on.

Conversely, we must say that the further the intelligence
passes beyond the limits of a purely technical activity, the less the
reference to the 'no matter whom', the 'anybody at all', is
applicable ; and that in the extreme case there will be no sense at
all in saying that such and such a task of lofty reflection could
have been carried out by anybody whatsoever. One might even
say, as I indicated in my first chapter, that the philosopher's task
involves not only unusual mental aptitudes but an unusual sense
of inner urgent need; and as I have already suggested, towards
the end of that chapter, we shall have to face the fact that in such
a world as we live in urgent inner needs of this type are almost
systematically misunderstood, are even deliberately discredited.
Our world today really gathers itself together against these needs,
it tugs in the other direction like, as it were, a sort of counter
weight; it does so, also, to the very extent to which technical
processes have emancipated themselves today from the ends to
which they ought normally to remain subordinate, and have
staked a claim to an autonomous reality, or an autonomous value.

'Don't you feel sometimes that we are living ... if you can
'call it living ... in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken
'watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at
'it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the
'watch to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know
'what I'm talking about, the world, what we call the world,

'the world of human creatures ... it seems to me it must have
'had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had
'stopped beating'.

That is a speech by the heroine of one of my plays, and from
time to time I shall be quoting from my own plays in this
way. For it is in these imaginative works of mine that my thought
is to be found in its virgin state, in, as it were, its first gushings
from the source. I shall try later on to explain why this is so and
how the drama, as a mode of expression, has forced itself upon
me, and become intimately linked with my properly philosophical
work. The young woman wrho makes this speech is not intended
to rank among what we usually call intellectuals . She is a fashion
able lady, smart, witty, flattered by her friends, but the busy, rush
ing life that she seems so much at home in obviously masks an inner
grief, an anguish, and it is that anguish which breaks through to the
surface in the speech I have just quoted.

A broken world? Can we really endorse these words? And
are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was
a time when the world had a heart? We must be careful here.
Certainly, it would be rash to attempt to put one's finger on
some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something
directly felt by men in general. But could we feel the division of
the world today, or could some of us at least feel it so strongly, if
we had not within us, I will not say the memory of such a united
world, but at least the nostalgia of it. What is even more import
ant is to grasp the fact that this feeling of a world divided grows
stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the
world (I mean of the earth, of this planet) appears to be proceed
ing apace. Some people make a great deal of this unification;
they think they see in it something like the quickening in the
womb of a higher conscience, they would say a planetary con
science. Much later in these lectures we shall have to face that
possibility, and finally to make a judgment on the real worth of
such hopes. But for the moment we have only to ask ourselves
about the particular, personal anguish felt today by people like
Christiane in my Le Monde Casse. What is the substance of that
anguish? And, in the first place, have we any grounds for attribut-

[22]

ing a general relevance to such personal experience?

There is one preliminary point that must occur to all of us ;
we live today in a world at war with itself, and this state of world-
war is being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in some
thing that could properly be described as world-suicide. This is
something one cannot be over-emphatic about. Suicide, until
our own times, was an individual possibility, it seemed to apply
only to the individual case. It seems now to apply to the case of
the whole human world. Of course, one may be tempted to say
that this new possibility is only part of the price we pay for the
amazing progress of our times. The world today is, in a sense,
at once whole and single in a way which, even quite recently, it
was not. It is from this very unity and totality that it draws its
sinister new power of self-destruction. The connection between
the new unity and the new power is something we ought to
concentrate on very carefully. Let us postpone, for the time
being, a consideration of the conditions that make world-suicide
possible and their significance; we are still forced to recognize
that the existence of the new power implies something vicious in
the new unity. It is not enough, I think, to say that the new unity
is still mixed with diversity, or at least 'mixed' is a weak and
inadequate word for what we mean. Mixture is in itself a certain
mode of unity, but we must recognize that it is a mode which in
a certain sense betrays the very need that has called it into exis
tence. And this suffices to show, as we shall see by and by much
more clearly, that unity is a profoundly ambiguous idea, and
that it is certainly not correct to take the scholastic line and to
regard unity and goodness as purely and simply convertible terms.
There is every reason to suppose that the kind of unity which
makes the self-destruction of our world possible (and by possible,
I mean perfectly conceivable) cannot be other than bad in itself,
and it is easy to perceive where the badness lies. It is linked to the
existence of a will to power which occurs under aspects that
cannot be reconciled with each other, and which assume opposite
ideological characters. On this topic, I cannot do better than
recommend to you Raymond Aron's book, The Great Schism.*
But it is clear also that from a strictly philosophical point of view

*Le Grand Schisme, Paris, 1947.

[23]

we must ask certain questions which fall outside the field of the
political writer as such.

From the philosophical point of view, the fundamental
question is whether it is a mere contingent fact that the will to
power always presents this character of discordance, or whether
there is a necessary connection between this discordance and the
essential notion of the will to power itself. It should also be our
business, indeed, not to content ourselves with a mere analysis
of the notion of the will to power, comparing that with the
notion of discordance, but to reflect in the light of history, whose
lessons, in this instance, have a strict coherence, on the inevitable
destiny of alliances, which, when they are instituted for purposes
of conquest, are inevitably fated to dissolve and to transform
themselves into enmities. It is, alas, true that one can imagine
the possibility of a single conqueror's gaining possession, today,
of the technical equipment that would render both rebellion and
opposition futile; and, in principle at least, it seems that a
government based on slavery and terror might last for an indefinite
period. But it is all too clear that such a government would be
only another form of the state of war, and indeed perhaps the
most odious form of that state that we can imagine. Besides, if
one refuses to let oneself be deceived bv mere fictitious abstrac
tions, one soon sees that the \ictor, far from himself being an
indissoluble unity, is always in fact a certain group of men in the
midst of whom there must always arise the same sort of rupture
which, as we have seen, always menaces alliances; so that at the
end of the day, it is still to war, and to war in a more obvious
form than that of a perpetual despotism, that the triumphant will
to power is likely to lead. It could only be otherwise — and yet
this is a real possibility, and should not be passed over in silence-
in a mechanized world, a world deprived of passion, a world in
which the slave ceased to feel himself a slave, and perhaps even
ceased to feel anything, and where the masters themselves
became perfectly apathetic : I mean, where they no longer felt
the greed and the ambition which are today the mainsprings of
every conquest, whatever it may be. It is very important to
notice that this hypothesis is by no means entirely a fantastic one ;
it is, at bottom, the hypothesis of those who imagine human

[H]

society as transformed into a sort of ant-hill. I would even be
tempted to say that the possibility of such a society is implicit in,
and that its coming into existence would be a logical develop
ment of, certain given factors in our own society. There are
sectors of human life in the present world where the process of
automatization applies not only, for instance, to certain definite
techniques, but to wrhat one wrould have formerly called the
inner life, a life which today, on the contrary, is becoming as outer
as possible. Only, it must be noticed that in a world of this sort
(supposing, which is not proved, that it would really come into
existence) it would no longer be proper to speak of the will to
powrer; or rather that expression would tend to lose its precise
psychological significance and would in the end stand merely,
as in Nietzsche, for some indistinct metaphysical something.
Our thinking tends to get lost, in fact, at this point, in the more
or less fictitious notion of a Nature considered as the expression of
pure Energy. I will quote, on this topic, a very characteristic
passage from Nietzsche's great work, The Will to Power — a great
work which is, in fact, nothing more than a heap of fragments.

'And', says Nietzsche, 'do you know what the world is for me?
'Would you like me to show you it in my mirror? This world,
'a monster of energy, without beginning or end: a fixed sum
'of energy, hard as bronze, which is never either augmented
'or diminished, \vhich does not use itself up but merely
'changes its shape; as a whole it has always the same invariable
'bulk, it is an exchequer in which there are no expenses and
'no losses, but similarly no gains through interest or new
'deposits ; shut up in the nothingness that acts as its limit, with
'nothing vaguely floating, with nothing squandered, it has no
'quality of infinite extension, but is gripped like a definite
'quantum of energy in a limited space, a space that has no room
'for voids. An energy present everywhere, one and multiple
'like the play offerees and waves offeree within a kinetic field
'that gather at one point if they slacken at another; a sea of
'energies in stormy perpetual flux, eternally in motion, with
'gigantic years of regular return, an ebb and a flowing in again
'of all its forces, going from the more simple to the more

'complex, from the more calm, the more fixed, the more
'frigid, to the more ardent, the more violent, the more con-
'tradictory, but only to return in due course from multiplicity
'to simplicity, from the play of contrasts to the assuagement of
'harmony, perpetually affirming its essence in the regularity of
'cycles and of years, and glorying in the sanctity of its eternal
'return as a becoming which knows neither satiety, nor
'lassitude, nor disgust . . . Do you \vant a name for this universe,
'an answer to all these urgent riddles, a light even for your-
' selves, you of the fellest darkness, you the most secret, the
'strongest, the most intrepid of all human spirits? This world
'is the world of the Will to Power and no other, and you
'yourselves, you are also the Will to Power, and nothing else.'

To whom is Nietzsche addressing himself here, if not to the
Masters whose advent he is announcing? Certainly, these mas
ters, as he conceived them, are far from resembling the dictators
we have known, or know still. The case really is, as Gustave
Thibon has shown beautifully in the fine book on Nietzsche he
brought out a few months ago, that a confusion tended to arise in
Nietzsche's thinking between two categories which cannot really
be reduced to each other.* Let us put it this way, that he was
hypnotized by a role, a purely lyrical role, which he wished
however to assume as his own role in real life, but with which he
was incapable of effectively identifying his actual self. This
^purely personal yearning was enough to vitiate his philosophy of
history ; nevertheless there is something, in the sort of glimpse
of an imaginary cosmos which I have just quoted, that does retain
its worth and its weight. Otherwise, I would not have quoted
that page. It does remain true that, in the 'broken world' we live
in, it is difficult indeed for the mind to withdraw itself from the
dizzying edge of these gulfs ; there is a fascination in that absolute
dynamism. One would be tempted to call Nietzsche's picture of
the world 'self-contained', in the sense that his 'monster of
energy' does not refer outwards to anything else that sustains or
dominates it ; except that for Nietzsche this 'self-contained' world
is essentially a mode of escape from the real self, in its pure
* Nietzsche, Lyons, 1949.

[26]

ungraspability. Let us note also in passing that if our world really
were such a world as Nietzsche here has described it to be, one
has no notion at all of how it could give birth to the thinker, or
the thought, which would conceive it as a whole and delineate
its characteristics. It always seems to happen so; when a 'realis
tic' attitude of this sort is pushed to the very limit with brutal,
unbridled logic, the 'idealistic' impulse rises to the surface again
and reduces the whole structure to dust. But let us notice that,
at the level of dialectics, it is this very process which makes mani
fest the disruption of the world. The world of the Will to Power,
as Nietzsche describes it — and it would be easy to show that this
world today provides the obscure and still indistinct background
of everything in contemporary thought that rejects God and
particularly the God of Christianity — that world cannot be
reconciled with the fundamental direction of the will that under
lies every investigation bearing upon what is intelligible and
what is true. Or rather, when, like Nietzsche, one does attempt
to reconcile the intention of the philosopher and that picture of
the world, one can only succeed in doing so by a systematic
discrediting and devaluation of intelligibility and truth as such ;
but in discrediting these, one is undermining oneself, for, after
all, every philosophy, in so far as it can be properly called a
philosophy at all, must claim to be true.

These general remarks may help us to see in what sense the
world we live in today really is a broken world. Yet they are not
enough to enable us to recognize and acknowledge how deep and
how wide the break really goes. The truth of the matter is that,
by a strange paradox and one which will not cease to exercise us
during the course of these lectures, in the more and more
collectivized world that we are now living in, the idea of any real
community becomes more and more inconceivable. Gustave
Thibon, to whom I referred just now in connection with
Nietzsche, had very good grounds indeed for saying that the two
processes of atomization and collectivization, far from excluding
each other as a superficial logic might be led to suppose, go hand
in hand, and are two essentially inseparable aspects of the same
process of devitalization.

To put it in quite general terms, and in simpler language

1*7]

than Thibon's, I would say that we are living in a world in which
the preposition 'with' — and I might also mention Whitehead's
noun, 'togetherness' — seems more and more to be losing its
meaning; one might put the same idea in another way by saying
that the very idea of a close human relationship (the intimate
relationship of large families, of old friends, of old neighbours, for
instance) is becoming increasingly hard to put into practice,
and is even being rather disparaged. And no doubt it is what lies
behind this disparagement that we ought to bring out. Here I
come to one of the central themes of these lectures ; but I shall
confine myself, for the moment, to treating the matter merely in
terms of a superficial description of the known facts.

It is, or so it seems to me, by starting from the fact of the
growringly complex and unified social organization of human life
today, that one can see most clearly what lies behind the loss,
for individuals, of life's old intimate quality. In what does this
gro\vingly complex organization — this socialization of life, as we
may call it — really consist? Primarily, in the fact that each one of
us is being treated today more and more as an agent, whose
behaviour ought to contribute towards the progress of a certain
social whole, a something rather distant, rather oppressive, let us
even frankly say rather tyrannical. This presupposes a registra
tion, an enrolment, not once and for all, like that of the new-born
child in the registrar's office, but again and again, repeatedly,
while life lasts. In countries like ours, where totalitarianism so
far is merely a threat, there are many gaps in this continuous
enrolment ; but there is nothing more easy than to imagine it as
coextensive with the whole span of the individual life. That is
what happens in states governed by a police dictatorship; in
passing, I should like to make the point that a police dictatorship
is (for many reasons, there is not time to go into them now)
merely the extreme limit towards which a bureaucracy that has
attained a certain degree of power inevitably tends. But the
essential point to grasp now, is that in the end I am in some danger
of confusing myself, my real personality, with the State's official
record of my activities ; and we ought to be really frightened of
what is implied in such an identification. This is all exemplified in
a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour by a young Rumanian called

[28]

C. Virgil Gheorgiu. In this extraordinary novel, we see a youn^
man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father-
in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew ; he has no
means of proving that he is not a Jew. He is labelled as such.
Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of
a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan
type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S. He is
now docketed as 'Pure Aryan, member of the S.S'. He contrives
to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners
and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and
stuffed with rich food ; but a few days later he is put into prison ;
according to his passport, he is a Rumanian subject. Rumanians
are enemies; ergo . . .Not the least account is taken of what the
young man himself thinks and feels. This is all simply and funda
mentally discounted. At the end of the book, he has managed to
get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the
Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family
hope to enjoy a happy reunion. Then the curtain rises for the
Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into
a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond
the Iron Curtain. But the small family group appeals to American
sentimentality, and a photograph is taken. 'Keep smiling', in
fact, are the last words of this interesting novel,* which sum
marizes graphically almost everything I have tried to explain in
this lecture.*

The point, here, is not only to recognize that the human, all
too human, powers that make up my life no longer sustain any
practical distinction between myself and the abstract individual
all of whose 'particulars' can be contained on the few sheets of an
official dossier, but that this strange reduction of a personality to
an official identity must have an inevitable repercussion on the
way I am forced to grasp myself; what is going to become of this
inner life, on which we have been concentrating so much of our
attention? What does a creature who is thus pushed about from

* La Vingt-cinquieme Heure, Paris, 1949.

*George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, which I read only a few months ago,

is of course another illuctration, even more striking than The Twenty-jifth

Hour of this set of ideas.

[29]

pillar to post, ticketed, docketed, labelled, become, for himself
and in himself? One might almost speak, in this connection, of a
social nudity, a social stripping, and one might ask oneself what
sort of shame this exposure is likely to excite among those who
see themselves condemned to undergo it?

To be honest, it does not seem to me that there is any real
deep analogy between this social nakedness and actual physical
nakedness, with the sense of slight shame which normally accom
panies such nakedness in man — a sense of shame on which the
Russian thinker, Soloviev, has some deep and original observa
tions. On the other hand, it is, I think, highly significant to com
pare the state of a man in his social nakedness — stripped, by
society, of all his protections — to that in which a man finds him
self who believes himself exposed to the observation of an
omnipresent and omniscient God. This comparison is all the
more necessary and important because the Moloch State of
totalitarian countries does tend to confer on itself a sort of
burlesque analogue of the Divine prerogatives. Only the essential
is lacking (that is to say, the State is not in fact God, or a God),
and this fundamental lack lies at the basis of the evils from which
any society must suffer that seeks to enchain itself by submitting
to the yoke of the Moloch State. The common factor in the two
types of nakedness — nakedness under the eyes of the State,
nakedness under the eyes of God — is, most assuredly, fear. But in
the presence of a real God, I mean a God who is not reduced to
the status of a mere savage idol, this fear has a note of reverence,
it is linked to our feeling for the sacred, and the sacred only is
such in and through our adoration of it. In the case of nakedness
under the eyes of the State, it is clear, on the other hand, that an
adoration, worthy properly to be called adoration, is impossible,
unless it attaches itself to the person of a Leader ; it is then pure
fanaticism, and it is enough to recall the hysterical cult of which
Hitler was the object to understand what fanaticism means, and
what great gulfs of temptation are masked by that word. But
between the Moloch State and such figures as Hitler the relation
ships that can be established are uncertain, unstable, threatening
either to the Leader or the State — if only because of the envy
and hate that Leaders must arouse in others who either would

covet their position for themselves or at any rate could not think
of somebody other than themselves enjoying it without impatience
and rage. It is all too clear that the state of universal continuous
registration and enrolment, from birth to death, to which I
have already alluded, can only be brought into being in the bosom
of an anonymous bureaucracy ; now, such a bureaucracy cannot
hope to inspire any other sentiment than a vague fear — the same
feeling that takes possession of me personally every time I have
to deal in a government office with some impersonal official who
identifies himself with his job. One cannot avoid, at this point,
bringing in the familiar metaphor of the administrative machine :
but it is important to notice that the workings of this machine
are not something I can contemplate, its presence is simply
something I feel: if I could contemplate its workings, I might be
forced to feel a certain reluctant admiration for it — as it is, as a
person who is being governed, who is being taxed, for instance,
my sentiments when the machine has been in contact with me
must be purely negative. To make them positive I would need a
chance to get to the other side of the counter and become myself
one of those privileged beings who contain a morsel of this
mysterious power. Thus it is quite natural that, in countries where
a bureaucratic system prevails, there should be a tendency
towards the general bureaucratization of life; that is to say, really,
towards the abandonment of concrete and creative activities in
favour of abstract, depersonalized, uncreative tasks and even —
one could illustrate this point easily — an active opposition to all
kinds of creativity.

Let us take it, though it is by no means certain, that in such
a bureaucratized world a certain social equality would prevail.
It would be an equality obtained by levelling down, down to the
very level where the creative impulse fails. But this kind of
equality — and perhaps every kind of equality — is (though in my
own country the opposite has for long been thought to be the case)
in the last analysis rigorously incompatible with any sort of
fraternity; it appeals to a different need, at a different level of
human nature. One could prove this point in various ways. In
particular, it is easy to see that the very idea of fraternity implies
the idea of a father, and is not really separable, indeed, from the

[3-]

idea of a transcendent Being who has created me but has also

o

created you. It is exactly at this point that we see the yawning
central gap, which I mentioned earlier, in the claims of the
Moloch State to be treated as a sort of God. One can see clearly
enough that the State can in no case be treated as a creator or a
father. Yet almost unconsciously here I have stumbled on an
ambiguity. There are different levels at which men understand
the word God. It is true that the State in our time, even in
countries where it has not reached the totalitarian phase, has
become more and more the engrosser and dispenser of all sorts
of favours, which must be snatched from it by whatever means
are available, including even blackmail. In this respect the State
is properly comparable to a God, but to the God of degraded
cults on whom the sorcerer claims to exercise his magic powers.
From the moment, however, wrhen the ties of fraternity are
snapped — and there is nothing that can take their place except
a Nietzschean 'resentment' or, at the very best, some working
social agreement strictly subordinated to definite materialistic-
purposes, as in the social theories, say, of the early English
utilitarians — the state of social atomization, of \vhich I spoke
earlier, inevitably tends to appear. All this, of course, cannot be
taken literally as the expression of a state of affairs which has
been, by now, established for once and for all. In different
countries, this state of affairs is established to different degrees,
and even sometimes in different parts of the same country ; and
in any case, wherever there are men, there are certain vital
persisting elements. Using the histological simile which always
seems to crop up in this sort of discussion, I \vould say that there
are some kinds of tissue that have a good resistance to this
contagion, or rather to this malignant growth. But the main point
is to see that here we have what is really the general prevailing
tendency today in most countries that wre usually think of as
civilized. I am not talking merely about the states, for instance,
that follow in the path of Soviet Communism. We can show, and
in fact it has already been shown (I am thinking particularly of
the remarkable books by Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron*) that

*Arnaud Dandieu, Decadence de la Nation francaise, Paris, 1931. Robert
Aron, La Revolution nccessaire, Paris, 1933.

[32]

large-scale capitalism exposes the countries in which it is a con
trolling factor to similar risks. In any case, it is not the usual
antithesis between the Communists and the enemies of the
Communists that is our point here ; no doubt I shall come back
to this at the end of these lectures, when I shall try to make clear
the conclusions towards which this investigation has led us.

'But', you may feel inclined to say to me at this point, 'we do
not see exactly in what sense our world can be called a broken
world, since you yourself admit that it is on the way to being
unified, though you have added that the unification is probably
the pleasing stamp on a coin that rings false.' The answer, it
seems to me, is that — even given a degree of atomization of which
we have as yet no direct experience, and which can only be con
ceived entirely in the abstract — it seems impossible that man
should reduce himself to that mere expression of an official dos
sier, that passive enrolled agent, with which some seek to confuse
his essential nature.

Let us notice this fact : even if, as is certainly the case, there
should be a tendency for a sinister alliance to be concluded
between the masters of scientific technique and the men who are
working for complete state-control, the real conditions under
which a human creature appears in the world and develops there
remain, in spite of everything, out of reach of this strange
coalition — even though certain experiments which are now being
carried out in laboratories give us reason to fear that this relative
immunity may not be of long duration. But what we can affirm
with absolute certainty is that there is within the human creature
as we know him something that protests against the sort of rape
or violation of which he is the victim ; and this torn, protesting
state of the human creature is enough to justify us in asserting
that the world in which we live is a broken world. That is not all.
Our world is more and more given over to the power of words,
and of words that have been in a great measure emptied of their
authentic content. Such words as liberty, person, democracy, are
being more and more lavishly used, and are becoming slogans, in a
world in which they are tending more and more to lose their
authentic significance. It is even hard to resist the impression that
just because the realities for which these words stand are dwindling

D [33]

away, the words themselves are suffering an inflation, which is
just like the inflation of money when goods are scarce. It may be,
indeed, that between the development of tokens of meaning, and
that of tokens of purchasing power, there is some obscure
connection, easier to feel in a general and indistinct way than to
work out in detail. But certainly that break in the world which
I have been trying, all through this lecture, to make you feel, is
broad and gaping here. The depreciation, today, both of words
and of currency corresponds to a general failure of trust, of con
fidence, of (both in the banker's sense of the word and in the
strongest general sense) credit.

There is, however, one more question which we must
examine, and which might be put from a strictly religious point
of view. If anybody accepts the dogma of the Fall, is there not
implicit in that acceptance an admission that the world is, in fact,
broken? In other words, is it not the case that the world is
essentially broken . . . not merely historically broken, as we have
seemed to be saying, basing ourselves, as we have done, on a
certain number of facts about the contemporary world? Does
not our talk about a broken world imply that there have been
periods when the world was intact, though this implication
contradicts both the teachings of the Church and all the showings
of history?

For my own part, I would certainly answer, without any
hesitation, that this break in the world cannot be considered as
something that has come about in recent years, or even during
recent centuries, in a world originally unbroken. To say so would
not only be contrary, I repeat, to all historical likelihood but
even metaphysically indefensible. For we should be forced in
that case to admit that some incomprehensible external action
or other has been brought to bear on the world ; but it is all too
clear that the world itself must have already contained the possi
bility of being broken. But what we can say, without contradict
ing either the recorded facts of history or the more obvious
principles of metaphysics, is that in our time the broken state
of the world has become a much more obvious thing than it would
have been for, say, a seventeenth-century philosopher. In general,

[34]

such a philosopher would have recognized that broken state only
on a theological plane; a man like Pascal, who came to such a
recognition through a long process of psychological and moral
analysis, anticipating the thought of a much later day, was an
exception. In the eighteenth century, the optimism which was
common among non-Christian philosophers suffices to show
that this feeling of living in a broken world was not, on the
whole, widely diffused; even those who, like Rousseau, insisted
that the time was out of joint, felt that a certain combination of
rationality and sensibility might set them right. It is clear enough
that this belief in the possibility of benevolently readjusting human
affairs persisted throughout the nineteenth century among
various schools of rationalists, and that it has not entirely disap
peared even today. Marxism itself might be considered, in its
beginnings, as an optimistic philosophy, though today the general
darkening of the historical horizon makes that element of opti
mism in it less and less perceptible. Besides, it is becoming more
and more clear that there is nothing in Marxism that would serve
to dissipate that deep sense of inner disquiet that lies at the very
roots of metaphysics. At the most, the Marxist can hope to numb
that, as one numbs a pain. There is nothing easier than to imagine
an analgesic technique for this purpose ; metaphysical uneasiness
would be considered as a psychosomatic malady and would be
treated according to the appropriate medical rules. Thus, for
Marxists in general, the problem of death as such must no longer
be faced, or rather they consider that the problem will cease to
have its present agonizing character for an individual who is fully
integrated with his community. But integration conceived after
this fashion runs the risk, as we shall see later on when we discuss
the nature of liberty, of reducing itself to mere automatization.
Why, it may be well asked at this point, have we lingered so
long, in this lecture, over topics which at a first glance seem quite
foreign to the proper themes of a metaphysical investigation?
Simply because it was necessary to describe those conditions, in
our life today, which are the conditions most unpropitious to
such an investigation; so unpropitious, indeed, that in countries
where these conditions are fully operative, metaphysical thinking

[35]

loses its meaning and even ceases to be a practicable possibility.
Perhaps it may not be wholly useless to enlarge a little on this
point.

The world which I have just been sketching for you, and
which is tending to become the world we live in, which is
already indeed the world we live in, in so far as that world is
exposed to the possibility of self-destruction, rests wholly on an
immense refusal, into whose nature we shall have to search much
more deeply, but which seems to be above all the refusal to
reflect and at the same time the refusal to imagine — for there is a
much closer connection between reflecting and imagining than
is usually admitted. If the unimaginable evils which a new world
war would bring upon us were genuinely imagined, to any extent
at all, that new world war would become impossible. But do
not let us be led into supposing that this failure to reflect and
to imagine is merely the fault of a comparatively few individuals
in positions of power and responsibility; these few individuals are
nothing at all without the millions of others who place a blind
trust in them. But this failure to reflect and imagine is bound up,
also, with a radical incapacity to draw conclusions from the sort
of thing that has been happening for at least fifty years. Was it
not already incredible, in 1939, that men should be found ready
to launch another war when the ruins piled up by the previous
war had not yet been wholly rebuilt, and when events themselves
had demonstrated in the most peremptory fashion that war does
not pay? Possibly somebody may feel that such remarks smack of
journalism and are hardly worthy of a qualified philosopher.
But I fear that any such criticism would merely be an expression of
a gravely erroneous conception of philosophy, a conception which
for too long has weighed heavily on philosophy itself, and has
helped to strike it with barrenness ; this erroneous conception
consists in imagining that the philosopher as such ought not to
concern himself with passing events, that his job on the contrary
is to give laws in a timeless realm, and to consider contemporary
occurrences with the same indifference with which a stroller
through a wood considers the bustlings of an ant-hill. One might
be tempted, indeed, to suppose that both Hegelianism and Marx
ism have considerably modified this traditional way of looking at

[36]

philosophy ; but that is true only up to a certain point, at least in
the case of present-day representatives of these doctrines. An
orthodox Marxist accepts without any real criticism the daring
extrapolation by which Marx treated as quite universal those
conditions which had been revealed to him by an analysis of the
social situation of his own time in those countries which had just
been transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Let us add that
the Marxist sets out to criticize existing societies using as his
yardstick the indeterminate and psychologically empty idea of a
classless society. In this respect, it would be no exaggeration to
say that the Marxist places himself in the worst sort of timeless
realm, an historical timeless realm, and that it is his stance on this
non-existent point of vantage that enables him to decide so
confidently whether such and such an event, or such and such
an institution, is or is not in keeping with 'the meaning of
history'. I, for my part, think on the contrary that a philosophy
worthy of the name ought to attach itself to a given concrete
situation in order to grasp what that situation implies; and I
think it should not fail to acknowledge the almost inconceivable
multiplicity of combinations of events that may arise from the
factors it has laid bare by its analysis.

In a very general way, one may say that the refusal to reflect,
which lies at the root of a great many contemporary evils, is
linked to the grip which desire and especially fear have on men.
On this topic, of the baleful effect of the passions if the reasonable
will does not control them, it is all too sadly clear that the great
intellectualist doctrines of philosophy (those, above all, of
Spinoza) are being grimly borne out. To desire and fear we ought,
certainly, to add vanity, above all the vanity of specialists, of
those who set themselves up as experts. This is true, for instance,
in the educational world; in France to my own knowledge, but
not only in France. I have often said that if one were rash enough
to ask what will remain, under any form at all, in the minds of
children, of all that has been painfully taught them, what will be
the final positive result of the effort that is demanded from them,
the whole system would fall to bits, for it is absolutely certain
that as regards most of the subjects taught this final positive
result will be precisely nothing. Those who are responsible for

[37]

our educational programmes have not the elementary shrewdness
of the industrialist who, before undertaking a new enterprise,
ascertains what will be the initial outlay, what are the probable
yearly profits, and whether the proportion between these two
figures makes the whole thing worth his while. One is careful
not to ask such a question of educational experts ; would one not
be insulting a noble profession? Yet fine words butter no parsnips.
They are simply taking advantage of the fact that in teaching the
outlay is less visible, less easily definable than in the case of an
industrial enterprise ; hence a waste of time and strength whose
remoter consequences are beyond all calculation.

We shall be starting off, in the lectures that are to follow,
from the double observation that nothing is more necessary than
that one should reflect; but that on the other hand reflection is
not a task like other tasks ; in reality it is not a task at all, since it
is reflection that enables us to set about any task whatsoever, in
an orderly fashion. We should be quite clear about the very
nature of reflection; or, to express myself in more exact terms,
it is necessary that reflection, by its own efforts, should make
itself transparent to itself. It may be, nevertheless, that this process
of reflective self-clarification cannot be pushed to the last extreme ;
it may be, as we shall see, that reflection, interrogating itself
about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it
inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, something
from which it has to draw its strength. And, as I said above, it
may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective
unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert
upon itself.

[38]

CHAPTER III

THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE*

THIS sort of circular panorama of our subject has not yet
made very clear to us the real significance and nature of
this investigation. We have found out what it is not; also, what
conditions are likely to freeze its growth. We must now seek to
grasp more directly what such an investigation is : and first of all
we must ask ourselves what is the nature of that urgent inner
need, of which I have spoken so often as being, in a way, the
mainspring of such investigations.

I should like to call it a need for transcendence. Unfortun
ately, that word has been lately much abused both by contem
porary German philosophers and some of their French pupils. I
should like to lay it down in principle that 'transcendence' cannot
merely mean 'going beyond'. There are various ways of 'going
beyond', for instance, for which 'transcendence' is an inappro
priate word. There is going beyond in space : encroaching, as
the explorer does, on some surface that lies beyond a commonly
accepted limit. But there is also going beyond in time: I am
thinking particularly of the notion of the 'project', the sort of
moral claim upon the future, which plays such an important part
in Sartre's thinking. If we call these 'transcendence', we are
extending the meaning of the word in a way which may be

O O J J

grammatically permissible, but which is philosophically confusing.
I would rather cling to the traditional antithesis between the
immanent and the transcendent as it is presented to us in text
books of metaphysics and theology. And, though I know there
will be objections to this, I should even like to make a distinction
between a horizontal and a vertical 'going beyond', the latter
of which is more truly transcendence. We have already met with

*The word ' need ' does not convey the meaning of the French word exigence ;
the German equivalent would be Fordcrung.

[39]

the main objections; they have to do with the use in an abstract
metaphysical argument of categories that seem to belong
exclusively to our individual perception of space. But really our
way of evaluating certain experiences as 'high' and others as 'low'
appears in a sense to be a fundamental thing, linked, as it were, to
our very mode of existence as incarnate beings. I should like to
mention in passing the important researches on such spatial
metaphors that have been carried out separately by Dr. Minkowski
and M. Robert Desoille. Their level of approach is rather differ
ent; both are psychiatrists, but Dr. Minkowski has the advantage
of being specially trained in philosophy and the phenomenologic
method, as M. Desoille is not.*

I think, however, that these objections should not simply
be thrust aside, but rather taken up, and transformed into an
argument on our own behalf. The argument might also be
illustrated by an analysis bearing on the inevitable ambiguity
which attaches, today, to the notion of 'the heavens above'.
In France, we have known rationalists who have expended a great
deal of exuberant irony in lucid demonstrations of the pre-
ccpernican character of the theological idea of heaven : they

*m his extremely interesting book, Vers une Cosmologie, (Paris, Fernand Aubier,
1936), Dr. Minkowski speaks of a primitive space of experience in which
our thoughts and ideas, as well as our bodies, can be said to move. The nature
of this primitive space varies according to exactly what is moving through it ;
thus Dr. Minkowski suggests that we can contrast our inner with our outer,
our mental with our physical space. He gives an example that perhaps may
make his drift clearer. I am saying goodbye on a station platform to someone
I care for deeply; the train moves off, my friend is still leaning out of the
window, and instinctively I run after the train, stretching out my hands towards
him. At the end of the platform, as the train disappears from sight, I do actually
stop running, but nevertheless, in my inner space, I am still pursuing it; my
thought follows the train and participates, so to speak, in the movement which
is carrying away part of my being. Dr. Minkowski observes that, according to
our usual way of thinking, the only real motion is bodily motion ; but this, he
says, is a false way of thinking, for thought moves, too. And possibly, on my
way out of the station, lost in the thought that is still following my friend as
he is carried away from me, I may bump into somebody. 'I am sorry,' I shall
say, 'I didn't notice where I was going, my thoughts were somewhere else . . .'
This is a striking illustration of what inner space, lived space, the space of
experience, means; and later in this series of lectures we shall have, I fancy, to
remember this notion and to make use of it.

[40]

have insisted at length, and in a rather laborious way, on the
absurdity of clinging to the traditional notions of an absolute
* height' and an absolute 'depths', a real 'up' and a real 'down', in
a world that has been enlightened by mathematical physics. But
strangely enough, it is the rationalists who in the end seem
simple-minded; they fail, it seems, to grasp that there are cate
gories of lived experience that cannot be transformed by any
scientific discoveries, even those of an Einstein. We feel the
earth below us, we see the sky above; the ways of expressing
ourselves that derive from that situation could be changed only
if the actual mode of our insertion into the universe could be
changed; and there is no chance at present of that. When we are
dealing, indeed, with such a simple matter as the correspondence
of certain postures of the human body to certain contrasting
emotions, we have to clench our minds to grasp what the problem
is. I am using the rather vague word 'correspondence' on purpose
in order not to bring in the questionable idea of a strictly causal
relationship. When we think, for instance, of the quite precise
and concrete emotional realities that translate themselves in
French into a noun like 'abattement' and in English into a

o

phrase like 'feeling cast down', is it not by an unnatural and,
indeed, by a barren effort that we try to separate the facts them
selves from the metaphor, rooted in language and hardly any
longer felt as a metaphor, that fits them like a glove? I may add
that the whole drift of such remarks will become clear only when
we have got further on our way.

Therefore, we have now to ask ourselves what this urgent
inner need for transcendence exactly consists of. I think we must
first of all try to map it out in relation to life as it is concretely
lived, and not to outline its shape in the high void of 'pure
thought' ; for my method of advance does invariably consist, as the
reader will have noticed already, in working my way up from life
to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that I may
try to throw more light upon life. But it would be a hopeless
undertaking, I think, to attempt to ensconce oneself, once and
for all, in the realm of pure thought. Or rather such an attempt
is not legitimate except in one or two quite specialized disciplines,
above all, of course, in the mathematical sciences; even so, it

is a moot and rather troublesome question whether the mathe
matician can develop his speculations in a world quite totally cut
off from experience, that is to say, fundamentally, from life. We
shall have, later on, to go in more detail into the exact relations
between these two important notions of 'experience' and of
'life' and to dissipate a confusion about these relations which
prevails in certain realms of philosophic thought.

Let us notice in the first place that the need for transcendence
presents itself above all, is deeply experienced above all, as a kind
of dissatisfaction. But the converse does not seem to be true, it
does not seem that one would be in the right in saying that every
kind of dissatisfaction implies an aspiration towards transcen
dence. It is important, I think, at this point to be as concrete as
possible, that is to say to dramatize, that is, to imagine, as
precisely as possible, the situation, the sort of situation in which
I may find myself involved. The personal pronoun T should, in
addition, be taken here in its widest sense. For it is not a matter
only of that finite individuality that I myself am, but of every
individuality with which I can sympathize in a lively enough way
to represent its inner attitudes to myself. I have no difficulty for
instance in putting myself in the place of somebody who suffers
from having to lead a narrow life, a life whose development is
embarrassed because all its expenses have to be kept at the lowest
level, and who dreams of an easier and larger existence; let us
imagine the case for instance of a young girl who, so that she
may obtain the satisfactions of which she feels herself deprived,
marries for money. Let us notice clearly that she perhaps frees
herself from certain religious and moral prejudices, and in this
sense one might, it seems, properly speak of a 'going beyond'.
On the other hand, we have a very clear sense indeed that the
need to which the girl has yielded cannot properly be called a
need for transcendence. That is enough to justify the distinction
which I made at the beginning of the lecture.

o o

We can now imagine a quite different case : the dissatisfac
tion of somebody who is on the contrary leading an easy life, full
of material satisfactions, but who wants to break with this
existence in order to commit himself to some spiritual adventure.
We should have to go on to an analysis of these two types of

[42]

dissatisfaction. The first, the girl's, is linked to the idea or,
more exactly, to the image of a certain number of goods to which
it seems to me that I have the right, or of which I feel myself
deprived. Yet it is not, as it seems to me, the idea of possession
as such which one should here chiefly stress. I would say, roughly
and generally, that the person who suffers from poverty aspires
above all to a liberty of movement which is denied to him.
Whatever he wants to do, he is brought up short by the question
of what it costs, and always he sees himself forced to renounce
his purpose. It would be quite unjust to suppose that the girl
who marries for money is necessarily inspired by cupidity, that
she loves money for its own sake. Perhaps she is even a generous
being who suffers particularly from not being able to help those
she loves. In this connection, it is thus possible to conceive an
hierarchy of satisfactions, some low and vulgar, others on the
contrary highly spiritual. Let us note in passing that at this point
the antithesis between the 'high' and the 'low' has cropped up
again. These satisfactions, though hierarchically arranged, have,
however, a common characteristic. They are all organically
linked with the fact of possessing a certain power which does not
fundamentally belong to me, a power which is not, strictly
speaking, myself. The dissatisfaction has to do with the absence
of something which is properly speaking external to me, though
I can assimilate it to myself and in consequence make it mine.
Let us not, at this point, bring in any moral judgments ; we have
not to ask ourselves whether marrying for money is in fact
equivalent to selling oneself, or if it ought to be considered as
blameworthy. We are moving at the level of description, and at
that level only.

It seems to me then that the first type of dissatisfaction
ceases at the moment when I have obtained the external help
that assures for me that freedom of movement that I need. But
the strange thing is, or so it seems, that the other type of dissatis
faction is directed precisely against satisfactions of this first type.
It is just as if — and we shall have to remember this point later
on — this libertv of movement which has been granted to us were

J O

to reveal itself as meaningless or quite worthless. Perhaps
meaningless or worthless, just because its principle lies not in

[43]

the self, but outside the self. From that moment, it is as if another
sort of yearning arose in me, directed not outwards, but inwards.
Naturally, the first example of this sort of yearning that presents
itself to our minds is the yearning for sanctity ; but it is not the
only example, and we can also think, at this point, of the case of
the creative artist. We can reflect upon the weariness that grips
the man who has read too many books, heard too many concerts,
visited too many galleries. If there is still enough life left in him,
that weariness will tend to transform itself into a desire to
create. Certainly, there is no guarantee that this new yearning
will be satisfied. It does not lie within my own choice to be a
creator, even if I genuinely aspire to creation. In other words,
one would be guilty of an indefensible simplification if one
asserted that the first kind of dissatisfaction is linked to the
absence of something that does not depend on me — such as
wealth — but that in the case of the second kind of dissatisfaction,
it is up to myself to put an end to it. The truth is infinitely more
subtle and complicated, and we cannot fall back here on the
famous Stoic distinction — between things that lie within our
power, and things that fall outside it — at least in its simple
original form.

We shall have to come back to this point later on when we
shall be trying to discern in what sense man is in the right in
considering himself as a free a^ent, but even now wre can see that
the fact of a man's managing to fulfil his vocation, however high
(and this is even truer, the higher his vocation is) could not be
explained away as being the result of a simple decree of his will.
There is, on the contrary, every reason to suppose that this
fulfilment of a high vocation involves a kind of co-operation from
a whole swarm of conditions over which the person with the
vocation has no direct control. This is a point of the greatest
importance and it shows that the problem of the vocation is
essentially a metaphysical one, and that its solution transcends
the scope of any psychological system whatsoever. It is not by
mere chance that the verb 'to transcend' has here intruded itself,
quite unexpectedly, into our discussion. We are already caught
up, as it were, within the poles of that transcendence which we
attempted to define in the first part of this lecture. Might it not

[44]

be said that to create is always to create at a level above oneself?
And is it not exactly, also, in this sort of connection that the
word 'above' assumes its specific value?

It is true that the great Swiss novelist, Ramuz, in whom we
must salute a thinker of profound power, seems, in his memories
of Stravinsky, to say precisely the contrary. 'I do not know why,'
he says, 'but I was reminded of that sentence of Nietzsche: "I
love the man who wants to create something higher than himself
and so perishes." But what I loved at that time in you was the
man who, on the contrary, creates something lower than himself
and does not perish.' But there is, it seems to me, a confusion
here, a confusion of which Jean Wahl is also perhaps guilty in
attempting to distinguish, in one of his essays, between transcend
ence and transdescendence. What Ramuz is trying to say here,
and what he has asserted many times, for instance in his book
Salutation Pqysanne* is that one can only make poetry with the
antipoetic, that art must be grafted on a wild stock, or rather
that the artist must start off from the rawest and most familiar
reality, contemplated in all its thickness, its primitive density.
It is extremely probable that Ramuz is right in saying this. But
there is no reason at all for denying a certain character of trans
cendence to this raw, familiar reality, always allowing that we
insist on one point, which is as follows, and which is very import
ant. There would be no meaning in treating transcendence as a
sort of predicate which could belong to one determinate reality
and not to another. On the contrary, the reference of the idea
to the general human condition is fundamental; but it must be
added that it is not a reference arrived at by way of abstract
thought, but rather one that is grasped through intimate- lived
experience — experience, in the sort of case I am talking about,
intimately lived in the inner awareness of the poet or the artist.
We should notice, however, that we have now raised a difficulty
which we must not evade. From the moment when the idea of
transcendence is evoked in relation to the human condition in
general, is it not negated as transcendence and in some sense
absorbed back into experience, that is to say, in a word, brought
back to the status of immanence? But in that case what becomes
* Paris, 1929.

[45]

of the urgent inner need for transcendence, properly so called?

Let us proceed in this case as we always ought to in cases of
this sort ; that is to say, reflectively, asking ourselves whether the
objection does not presuppose a postulate or rather an implicit
image which ought to be erased? What is in question here is the
very idea that we form of experience ; have we not an unjusti
fiable tendency to think of experience as a sort of given, more or
less shapeless substance, something like a sea whose shores are
hidden by a thick fog, and we have just been speaking as if the
transcendent was a sort of misty cloud which would by and by
melt away; but we have only to reflect upon what experience
really is, to realize that this metaphor is grossly inadequate. But
we must, I think, go further still, and this remark will apply, in
a certain sense, to all our future investigations. One cannot
protest too energetically not only against this particular way of
representing the idea of experience, but against the claim that
experience can possibly be represented, in any way at all.
Experience is not an object, and I am here taking the word 'object',
as I shall always be taking it, in its strictly etymological sense,
which is also the sense of the German word gegenstand, of some
thing flung in my way, something placed before me, facing me,
in my path. We must ask ourselves if some confused representa
tion of experience as an object is not really involved when, in
the manner of the Kantian philosophy if that is taken quite liter
ally, one speaks of what lies outside, what lies beyond the limits
of, experience. That, in the last analysis, can mean nothing,
since the judging of something to be outside experience is itself
empirical, that is to say it is a judgment made from within exper
ience.

These very simple remarks lead us to an important con
clusion, one of which we must never lose sight, especially during
the second series of these lectures, when we shall be touching
on more strictly metaphysical questions. Not only does the word
'transcendent' not mean 'transcending experience', but on the
contrary there must exist a possibility of having an experience of
the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the
word can have no meaning. One must not shirk the admission
that, at a first glance, such an assertion runs the risk of appearing

[46]

to contradict itself. But may not this be due to the fact that we
tend, without realizing it, to form far too restrictive an idea of
experience? A typical example of experience, taking the idea of
experience in a narrow sense, would be a sensation of taste; in
that case, experience appears to be linked to the presence of
something for me, and in me, and we interpret it as part of the act
of ingesting something. But it is obvious that this act of ingestion
is not part of the essence of experience as such, and that in other
cases, experience is not so much an absorbing into oneself of
something as a straining oneself towards something, as when, for
instance, during the night, we attempt to get a distinct percep
tion of some far-off noise. I am still confining myself to examples
belonging to the field of sensation. But we know very well that
experience goes far beyond the domain of the external senses ;
and it is also very obvious that in what we call the 'inner life'
experience can express itself through attitudes that may be
diametrically opposed to each other.

Moreover, I am not allowing myself to forget that in the
language of contemporary phenomenology the word 'transcen
dence' is understood in a much wider sense than that in which,
up to the present, I have been understanding it; every object, as
such, being considered, in that system, as a transcendent object.
However, as I have already said, I prefer to stick to the traditional
sense of the word, probing into it, however, more deeply than it
has been usual to do. Let us admit, for that matter, that for a
topic of this kind it is always very difficult to find an adequate
vocabulary. To say that the transcendent is still immanent in
experience, is to persist in objectifying experience and in
imagining it as a sort of space of which the transcendent would
be, so to say, one dimension. One can avoid such confusions
only by keeping continually present to one's thought the spiritual
meaning which one is stressing. Naturally, there is no possibility
of doing without symbols; nevertheless, symbols should always
be recognized as such and should never encroach on the ideas that
one is straining to elucidate through their use.

Thus, I repeat, the urgent inner need for transcendence
should never be interpreted as a need to pass beyond all exper
ience whatsoever; for beyond all experience, there is nothing;

[47]

I do not say merely nothing that can be thought, but nothing
that can be felt. It would be much more true to say that what is
our problem here is how to substitute a certain mode of exper
ience for other modes. Here again we have to battle against a
distorting symbolization which would represent these modes of
experiences as physical spaces separated by some kind of partition.
But it is sufficient, if we want to get rid of this misleading picture,
to turn to a concrete and precise example : let us think, if you are
willing, of the kind of inner transformation that can take place
within a personal relationship. Here, for instance, is a husband
who has begun by considering his wife in relation to himself, in
relation to the sensual enjoyments she can give him, or even
simply in relation to her services as an unpaid cook and char
woman. Let us suppose that he is gradually led into discovering
that this woman has a reality, a value of her own, and that, with
out realizing it, he gradually comes to treat her as a creature
existing in her own right ; it may be that he will finally become
capable of sacrificing for her sake a taste or a purpose which he
would formerly have regarded as having an unconditional im
portance. In this case, we are witnesses of a change in the mode
of experience which provides a direct illustration of my argument.
This change revolves upon the centre of an experiencing self; or,
to speak more exactly, let us say that the progress of the husband's
thought gradually substitutes one centre for another; and of
course the word 'thought' is not quite exactly the right word
here, for we are dealing with a change in the attitude of a human
being considered as a whole, and with that change, also, in so far
as it embodies itself in that human being's acts. I hope this
example gives us a glimpse, at least, of the direction in which
we must set ourselves to move if we want to give a meaning to
these words that are certainly obscure in themselves : urgent inner
needjbr transcendence.

It will be objected, nevertheless, that the term 'transcen
dence' taken in its full metaphysical sense seems essentially to
denote an otherness, and even an absolute otherness, and people
will ask how an experience of otherness as such can even be
conceived. Does not the other, qua other, fall by definition out
side my experience? Again, in this case, we must ask ourselves

[48]

whether the objection does not mask a preconceived idea which
we must bring to the surface before we can expose it to criticism.
Here again it is our conception, or again I would rather say our
image, of experience that is in question. The point is so import
ant at this juncture that we must be allowed to insist on it.

It may be said that the philosophy of the last century was in
a very large measure dominated by a prejudice which tried to
assume the dignity of a principle. The prejudice consisted in
admitting that all experience in the end comes down to a self's
experience of its own internal states. Let us notice, in passing,
that what we have here is a paradoxical conjunction, or osmosis,
of two contrasting elements — on the one hand a philosophy which
had originally been based purely on the reality of sensation, and
on the other hand an idealism whose nature was essentially
different. The first of these philosophies, so long as it remained
faithful to its first roots, was forced, for that matter, to deny to
the self all autonomous reality; one can even say, it seems to me,
that from this point of view (the point of view of Hume, for
instance) the self is built up out of its own states, or out of some
thing which is only an abstract and uncertain outcome of
these states. It was quite another matter for idealism (and Des
cartes is the obvious name to mention in this connection), for
which, on the contrary, the thinking self possesses an indubitable
existence, and even a real priority. I mean that for idealism the
thinking self stands as the necessary postulate without which any
kind of experience at all is inconceivable. One might be tempted
to say that for idealism it was rather the self's states of conscious
ness that had a wavering and doubtful metaphysical status. More
over, in this connection, one recalls, of course, the difficulties
that arise in Kant's doctrine about the relation between transcen
dental awareness and ordinary, everyday psychological awareness.
How can the Ich denke become an Ich flihle or an Ich erlebel It
could not be a matter, in this case, of course, of postulating a separ-
ateness, like the separateness of physical objects, between the
thinking self and the feeling self, that is, of claiming that the
one was not the same thing as the other. Such an affirmation
would result in the end in idealism's once more thingifying the
self. To avoid that impasse, idealism will be forced to speak of

H [49]

functional differences between the self that thinks and the self
that feels. But by this sort of schematism does one not risk dis
torting the nature of experience as a single lived reality? This is
a serious problem, to which we shall have to come back. Can
feeling be properly considered as a function of the self? Or is it
not rather the case that every function presupposes feeling as
anterior to it and other than it?

This mass of difficulties is bound to make us reflect, and to
force us to call in question the whole notion of 'a state of con
sciousness'. But we must get a clear grasp of the meaning of this
problem.

The notion of a state, taken in its most general sense, is one
that we cannot do without when we are thinking of bodies sub
mitted to all sorts of modifications that appertain to their physical
nature. I am not at this moment seeking to raise the difficult

o

metaphysical problem of just what the relations between a body,
considered in itself, and its modifications are, or more exactly
whether the phrase 'considered in itself can in such an instance
have a precise meaning. That question, for the moment, is not
relevant. What is beyond doubt is that we cannot afford to dis
pense with the idea of a state, if we want to describe the modifi
cations suffered by any body whatsoever under the influence of
external agencies. But then, when we speak of states of conscious
ness, is it not the case that, without being aware of it, we are
treating consciousness as a sort of bodiless body which is capable
of suffering an analogous series of modifications ? Let us understand
each other ; in so far as I am myself a body — later, we shall have
to consider at length the implications of this equivocal assertion
— it is all too clear that I pass through an infinity of successive
states. In so far as I am a body: but not at all in so far as I am a
consciousness. For, in a word, whatever the ultimate nature of
consciousness may be, it obviously cannot be considered as a
body, even a bodiless one. On this point, Descartes was right and
with him all the forms of idealism that are derived from his
thinking. Consciousness is essentially something that is the
contrary of a body, of a thing, of whatever thing one likes to
imagine, and given that fact it is permissible to think that the

[so]

expression 'state of consciousness' involves a contradiction in
terms.

One might be tempted to resolve the contradiction, as
Spinoza resolved it, by formulating the following observations :
might not one say that what we call a state of consciousness is the
state of a body at a given moment in so far as it is represented?
Represented, in this technical sense, means something like seen
in a mirror. Consciousness, on this theory, would be nothing
else than the fashion in which a body looks at itself. But this
solution raises innumerable difficulties and insoluble difficulties,
too. The most serious of these have to do with the word 'con
sciousness' itself. The word implies something permanent which
can only exist ideally, and it does not seem that one can attribute
this permanence to body as such. What seems to be proper to a
body, by reason of its very mutability, is to have no self. It is
selfless by definition. But that is not all : we must be wary of the
tendency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside con
sciousness in order to represent it to ourselves (here, as a mirror),
for all this can only be an illusory advance, since it is an intrinsic
quality of consciousness that it cannot be detached, contemplated,
and considered in this way. What we believe we are looking at

J o

from the outside is no longer consciousness, and perhaps it is not
even anything at all. It is necessary then to reject at this point the
conception according to which the so-called states of conscious
ness would be simply bodily states looking at themselves or
becoming objects for themselves. But this refusal entails import
ant consequences ; it is not difficult to see, for instance, that it
must lead us to reject the theory of psycho-physical parallelism.
I do not think, for that matter, that Bergson's criticism of that
theory has ever been refuted.

We are led, then, to this negative but very important con- "
elusion that it is not possible to treat all experience as coming
down in the end to a self's experience of its own states. The path
that we should follow here is rather that first explored and
mapped out by phenomenologists of the school of Husserl. I shall
therefore lay it down as a principle, to be accepted in the whole
of my subsequent argument, that, before it is anything else,

consciousness is above all consciousness of something which is
other than itself, what we call self-consciousness being on the
contrary a derivative act whose essential nature is, indeed, rather
uncertain; for we shall see in the sequel how difficult it is to
succeed in getting a direct glimpse of whatever it is that
wre mean by self. Even at this point, let us notice that I can
not know myself or even make an effort to know myself
without passing beyond this given self which I claim to know,
and this 'passing beyond' appears to be characteristic of con
sciousness, which is enough in itself to dispose of the idea of
consciousness as a mere mirror. Perhaps there are reasons for
supposing that epiphenomenalism, that is, the idea of conscious
ness as a mere surface encrustation on matter, has penetrated
today far beyond the bounds of materialism properly so called,
and that all modern minds need to make a painful effort if they
are to free themselves of this theory. Science and technique in
general have, after all, stressed very strongly in our time the idea
of a purely objective reality, a reality to which we all tend to
attribute, though falsely, an internal coherence.

But from the moment when one has understood that con
sciousness is consciousness of something other than itself, we can
easily overcome the temptation of epiphenomenalism, and at the
same time the objection against which the idea of transcendence
was hammering loses all its massive strength. It is necessary also,
at this point, to notice how much we must be on our guard against
all these metaphors which have been incorporated into the very
flesh of language and which consist in assimilating the fact of being
conscious to modes of physically gathering or taking. Such verbs
as 'seize' and 'grasp' are very revealing from this point of view.
Of course, it is not merely an unlucky chance if, even in an
investigation of this sort, we find ourselves making a spontaneous
use of them ; we can hardly prevent ourselves from practising this
sort of transposition of elusive notions into familiar, palpable
terms, but it is important that we should not be deceived by the
habit, and that we should be able to recognize within what limits
this kind of transposition can be properly and legitimately
exercised — limits outside of which it becomes illegitimate and
degenerates into something meaningless.

I should be inclined to say in a very general fashion that the
closer we get to the topic of intellection properly so called, the
more these metaphors centred on the acts of plucking, taking, or
grasping become really useless. One might admit that they are
suitable enough for all those acts of the mind which still partake
of habit. To form a habit is really to take, or seize, or grasp some
thing, for it is an acquisition; but to discover an intelligible
relation, for example some mathematical relation whose eternal
validity one suddenly recognizes, that is not in any sense to grasp
something; it is to be illuminated, or rather, to have a sudden
access to some reality's revelation of itself to us. What we should
notice here, however, is the impossibility of making a radical
distinction between acquisition and illumination ; for if illumin
ation is to be communicated it must inevitably become language,
and from the moment it has passed into a sentence it runs, in
some degree, the risk of blinding itself and of sharing in the sad
destiny of the sentence itself, which in the end will be repeated
mechanically, without the person who repeats it any longer
recognizing its meaning. Let us observe, moreover, that this
danger is not only one which attends a communication from my
self to another person, but that it also attends, if I may be
allowed to put it in this way, a communication from me to
myself. There is always the risk of the hardened, transmissible
expression of the illumination growing over the illumination
like a sort of shell and gradually taking its place. This is true at
all levels, true wherever anything has been revealed, for instance
about a work of art, a landscape, and so on ... It is just as if the
initial, living experience could survive only on condition of
degrading itself to a certain extent, or rather of shutting itself
up in its own simulacrum; but this simulacrum, which should
only be there on sufferance, as a kind of locum tenens, is always
threatening to free itself from its proper subordinate position
and to claim a kind of independence to which it has no
right ; and the serious danger to which thought itself is exposed
is that of starting off from the simulacrum, as an existing basis,
instead of referring itself perpetually to that invisible and gradu
ally less and less palpable presence, to indicate which (and to
recall it to our memories) is the sole justification of the simula-

crum's existence. This is a very general observation and it opens
out in all sorts of diverse directions. For the moment, I will
illustrate it by a single example which anticipates a good deal
that we shall see more clearly later on.

Here is a person of whom we have a detailed knowledge,
with whom we have lived, whom we have seen in many different
situations. But it may happen that we are asked to say something
about him, to answer questions about him, to offer a necessarily
simplified opinion of his character; we offer a few adjectives,
ready-made, rather than made to measure. This summary, inexact
judgment of our friend then, within ourselves, begins to form
what I have called a simulacrum. For it may paradoxically happen
that this simulacrum obstructs or dims the fundamentally far more
concrete idea we have formed of this person, an idea fundament
ally incommunicable, an idea which we cannot even communicate
in its pure essence to ourselves. And it is quite possible for the
simulacrum we have formed of our friend to change our attitude

O

to him, and even our behaviour towards him, for the worse.
Though it may be, of course, that some circumstance wrill arise
which will enable us to thrust aside this obstacle we have placed
in the path of a true human relationship, without realizing we
have done so.

There is, unfortunately, all too much reason to think that
many a philosophy of the past — before Bergson's time, who in this
field was a liberator whose beneficent activities can never be too
highly celebrated — has been built up not on experience but on
a waste product of experience that had taken experience's name.
For a philosopher worthy of the name there is no more important
undertaking than that of reinstating experience in the place of
such bad substitutes for it.

But, it will be asked, what is the relationship — or is there
even a relationship? — between the urgent inner need for trans
cendence and such a preoccupation? On a first impulse, one
would be tempted to answer in the negative: but why? Because
one would like to imagine, in accordance with a vicious fashion
of philosophizing, that transcendence is fundamentally the direc
tion in which we move away from experience. But the views that
have been put forward in the first part of this lecture have pre-

[54]

pared us to understand that this is false and that it presupposes an
idea of experience which robs experience of its true nature.

Here, it seems to me, is the anatomy of this error. One
cannot insist too strongly that what traditional empiricism failed
to see was that experience is not, in any sense, something which
resembles an impermeable mass. I would rather say that exper
ience is receptive to very different degrees of saturation ; I employ
this expression from chemistry (where one talks, for instance, of
a saturated solution, meaning one into which no new substance
can be dissolved) with regret, and I shall seek for other expres
sions, so that our thought may not become fixed on a necessarily
inadequate simile. One might, say, for example, that experience
has varying degrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it
is distilled, and it is now of water that I am thinking. What I ask
myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need for trans
cendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide
with an aspiration towards a purer and purer mode of experience.
I can quite see, of course, that the two metaphors of which I have
made use appear to be contradictory — the metaphors of satura
tion and purity. But it is just this kind of opposition, linked to the
material world, that tends to disappear at the spiritual level. We
have only, if I may put it so, to dematerialize the initial com
parison to see how it can fit in with the second. Let us think, for
instance, not of a heavy body like salt, saturating a solution, but
of radiations ; one can imagine some liquid at once very pure and
very radioactive; and, of course, even the notion of radioactivity
is still borrowed from the physical world. Let us now imagine
in an even vaguer fashion whatever sort of thing an intelligible
essence might be, and we can easily conceive that the experience
most fully charged with these imponderable elements, intelligible
essences, might at the same time be the purest. We shall have to
bear in mind the connection between plenitude and purity when
we attempt to throw light, later on, upon how we ought, and
above all upon how we ought not, to conceive an essence.

But even if we cling to the notion of saturation, we should
have no difficulty in understanding that two completely opposite
kinds of saturation of experience can be imagined. An experience
can be saturated with prejudices : but this means that the prejudice

[ss]

which obstructs it at the same time prevents it from being fully
an experience. Often, for instance, when we are travelling in a
strange country, it is precisely so ; we are unable to free ourselves
from a certain number of preconceived ideas which we have
brought with us without being distinctly awareV)f having done so ;
they are like distorting spectacles through which we look at
everything that is presented to us. The other type of saturation is
the opposite ; one might say, to recall an old notion of the Greeks,
that the eye must become light in order to comport itself properly
in the face of light, and that this is not true only of the eye ; the
intelligence must become at once pure ardour and pure recept
ivity. It is necessary to put these two words together, the process
I am imagining is a simultaneous one. If we put the stress exclus
ively on ardour, we cease to see how the intelligence is able to un
derstand things ; it seems that it is no longer properly intelligence,
but merely enthusiasm ; but if we insist only on receptivity, we
are already the dupes of that material image which I have already
taken note of; we persuade ourselves falsely that to understand,
for the mind, is like, for a vessel, being filled with a certain
content. But the intelligence can never be properly compared to a
content, and it is of this that we shall convince ourselves in our
next lecture when we attempt to sound the depths of what is to
be understood by the notion of truth.

CHAPTER IV

TRUTH ASA VALUE:
THE INTELLIGIBLE BACKGROUND

IN this lecture, which will be taken up entirely with an inves
tigation bearing upon the question of what we have in mind
when we talk about truth, I shall have to refer to the essay by
Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. I shall only do so,
however, in a rather wary fashion. The largely novel vocabulary
of this German philosopher cannot fail to arouse, in many of his
readers, a grave uneasiness. In passing, I would like on this topic
to remark that when he coins new words, a philosopher is often
the victim of an illusion. The strange and surprising impression
produced on him by his new word often prevents him from seeing
that there is nothing strange or surprising about the thought it
expresses. What lies behind the creation of such words is often
the shock which the philosopher has felt in rediscovering, on his
own account, something that was already discovered long before
him. This rediscovery is not discovery, in the proper sense of the
word .

It is my own intention, on the other hand, to use, with one
or two exceptions, the simplest words I can find. But it will be
hard for my listeners, I know, to determine, without a wide mar
gin of uncertainty, the relation between the comparatively every
day language which I shall be using and that of the German
philosopher; though the Belgian philosopher, Alphonse de
Waehlens, did a great deal to elucidate Heidegger's terminology
in his French translation of Heidegger's* essay which appeared at
Louvain in 1948.

One of my pupils observed to me the other day that there is
more material in my plays than in my speculative writings that
could be used for the working out of a doctrine of truth. And

o

when I had thought it over carefully, I thought his remark
*De V Essence de la Veritc, par M. Heidegger, Louvain, 1948.

[57]

basically sound. But if this is so, is it mere chance that it is so?
Obviously not. The fact is simply the indirect confirmation of
the more general fact that when we set out to speak about truth,
as when we set out to speak about God, we are in danger of
speaking about something which is not truth, but is merely its
simulacrum ; here again is that word which played such an import
ant part in our last lecture. We must ask ourselves, then, whether
truth is something which can only be alluded to, in a glancing
way. The role of the drama, at a certain level, seems to be to place
us at a point of vantage at which truth is made concrete to us,
far above any level of abstract definitions. Let us see whether this
reflection serves, or does not serve, to confirm our preliminary
assumptions.

In order to throw more light on the direction of our quest,
I should like to insist strongly that what matters for us is to
elucidate our own meaning when we say, for instance, that we
are guided by the love of truth, or that somebody has sacrificed
himself for the truth. Let us ask ourselves what condition, even
and perhaps above all what negative condition, such assertions
must satisfy if they are to have a meaning. It is obvious at a first
glance that a traditional formula, such as 'truth is the adequation
of the thing and the intellect', whatever its theoretic value may
be, is by no means suited to throw light on such assertions.
There would be no meaning in saying that somebody had died for
the adequation of the thing and the intellect. This in itself serves
to show that the idea of truth has a fundamental ambiguity. Let
us take it for the present that we are applying ourselves to the
consideration of truth in so far as truth is a value ; it is only under
this aspect that truth can become 'something at stake' .

I shall start off with a very simple example, and from my
point of view a very instructive one. We have all been taught
from our earliest years that we must not confuse what we should
like to be the case and what is the truth. A great Doctor of the

o

Church has even declared that this confusion is a perversion of the
understanding. But, first of all, is there any difference at all here
between what is the truth and what simply is? Is it not obvious
that what is true is nothing other than what is, what exists, what
is the case ; from a certain point of view, the difference between

them is non-existent. But only from a certain point of view, and
more precisely from the perspective of a kind of thinking turned
at once towards the object and towards possible action on the
object, that is to say, a thinking along the lines of technique.
What, then, is the other perspective, within which a distinction
between what is true, and what is, must in spite of everything
be maintained? On what will it lay its stress? I will quote here
an important passage from Bradley in his Essays on Truth and
Reality. We shall have to ask ourselves if it throws some light
on our problem :

1 Truth is the whole Universe realizing itself in one aspect. This
'way of realization is one-sided, and it is a way not in the end
'satisfying even its own demands, but felt by itself to be incom-
'plete. On the other hand the completion of Truth itself is
'seen to lead to an all-inclusive Reality, which Reality is not
'outside Truth. For it is the whole Universe which, immanent
'throughout, realizes and seeks itself in Truth. This is the end
'to which Truth leads and points, and without which it is not
'satisfied. And those aspects in which Truth for itself is defec-
'tive, are precisely those which make the difference between
'Truth and Reality.'

In other words, Truth distinguishes itself from Reality in
the measure in which it is only a single aspect among others, or is
unilateral, while Reality is in essence omni-comprehensive.

But, for reasons which will appear more clearly in the sequel,
I shall refrain from bringing in, as a solution of this problem that
is occupying us, the notion of an omni-comprehensive reality;
for though the latter idea dominates all Bradley's thinking, I am
afraid it is by no means invulnerable to all criticism. What we
should notice here is that the operation of including (and Bradley
builds up his Absolute by an hierarchy of inclusions) is one which
can only be carried out within the bosom of a relatively, not
absolutely, complete system or totality which is then stretched
out to gather in the new element that has to be included; more
precisely, I would say this method of inclusion is suitable only for
a pattern of philosophical thought which is in motion, which is in
the process of completing itself. It is obvious that such an inclusive

[59]

system of thought can only, at any time, be provisionally rounded
off; there is always a tension between the system in itself, con
sidered as a whole, and the elements of experience that have still
to be absorbed in it. It remains to be shown, and most probably
it cannot be shown, that we have the right to pass the ideal
limiting case, where nothing more need be absorbed; and that
the act of inclusion remains possible or conceivable where the
level of thought on the move, let us say of discursive thought, has
been transcended, and where we profess to have established
ourselves at a point beyond all development.

It seems to me that it would be better to set out on a more
modest path, that is to say that of the phenomenologists, and to
ask ourselves just what we have in mind when we talk about the
difference between being and being true.

One solution presents itself naturally to the mind, which has
been adopted by numerous philosophers : it consists of saying that
truth has to do exclusively with judgments. A judgment is true
or false, but one cannot talk of truth or falsity in the case of a
sensation or a sentiment. Sensations and sentiments, in all the
judgments we make about them, appear to be merely themselves.

This distinction, however, must be treated with more
caution than is commonly thought necessary. For in affirming the
self-identity of sensations and sentiments, in saying that within
all judgments and for all judgments they are simply what they are,
am I not forgetting their real nature ? Or rather — for if they had a
real nature, it would not be necessary to assert that self-identity —
am I not mistaken in supposing that they have a nature in this
sense? They are fugitive, they are elusive it may be said, thought
cannot fix them, and it is only where thought can fix something
that we can properly talk of its having a nature. Obviously, at
this point, we are getting rather close to a certain aspect of
Platonism : the notion that the world of the senses and feelings is
somehow unreal unless it is transformed into a higher world
cf concepts. However, before we can accept such a position,
we have to face a serious difficulty. After all, to take a quite
elementary example, a flavour, for instance, does appear to bear
witness to the presence of something that has a nature, a self-
identity. There must be something there, after all, if there is

[60]

something that I can talk about. I can say, for instance: I like,
or I do not like, the taste of raspberries, the smell of tar. And
what testifies to the self-identity of that taste or that smell is that
I have only to experience them afresh, after a gap of years, to be
carried back into a distant past which is essentially 7717 past. The
most we can say is that there is a sense in which I can confidently
affirm that my companion and I are talking about the same sen
sation when we discuss the taste of raspberries, I saying I like it,
he that he does not. What, however, makes the question really
obscure is that it is almost impossible to distinguish sharply between
the kernel of the sensation and the kind of array of emotional
overtones that encloses it, and that inevitably varies with each
individual because the background of experience as a whole, for
each individual, is different. Thus the taste of raspberries may be
linked in my case with walks in the Vosges woodlands with people
I love, and for somebody else with a house and a garden in the Paris
suburbs where he spent his childhood holidays under the care of
a bad-tempered grandfather. Yet in principle the distinction
between the kernel and its shell remains valid, and the notion of
the kernel of sensation retains its theoretic validity. Thus, after
all, it does not seem to be quite that sensations and sentiments
are always too fugitive to be fixed by thought; or that thought
cannot refer to them without transforming them into something
other than themselves, something essentially, as sensations and
sentiments are not, objective.

But on the other hand we ought to notice that as soon as we
admit the existence of this kernel, we admit also the possibility
of a certain congruousness between my own grasp of it and
another person's; this congruousness cannot be accidental, but it
is by no means guaranteed. For instance, I once knew a man who
thought raspberries had no taste ; there can be a sort of taste-
blindness, and the same sort of thing is true over the whole range
of possible sensations. There are many people who cannot tell
the difference between the great vintages and very ordinary
wines. It would be a fallacy to draw negative or even relativist
conclusions from such facts. In every realm of sense-experience
there are connoisseurs ; their gifts are real and cannot be denied
without absurdity. Let us add, to round off this argument, that

[61]

the non-connoisseur is in no position to deny the connoisseur's
status; in fact the non-connoisseur ought to recognize his own
condition, which is that of being shut off from certain realities.
Realities, I say. Could I not say truths? After what seemed a
digression, we have come back to our original problem.

It may be objected, indeed, that whether we talk of truths
or realities here depends on how we choose to define our terms.
But there is an important point that hangs on that 'how we choose' :
whether we seize on this word, or on that word, to fix a real
distinction which we have perceived, the distinction must be, as
it were, in the long run accepted and sustained by the common
idiom of language. The non-connoisseur is keeping within the
bounds of truth when he recognizes that he is a non-connoisseur ;
he is falling outside these bounds when he fails to recognize that
fact. But it would be absurd to say that he is falling outside the
bounds of reality. Whatever truths he fails to recognize, he him
self remains perfectly real. And if he is a conceited man, for
instance, his refusal to recognize his deficiency may reflect his
real nature excellently well, unless indeed we are using 'real
nature' in a non-psychological sense — a point which leads us
back to a path we have trodden before. What we are aiming at,
in fact, when we grope for the idea of truth, is not the kind of
rounded and complete positive experience that we might be
aiming at if we were groping for the idea of reality. On the con
trary, one can be within the bounds of truth and one's reality can
be suffering from a denudation, a lack ; I am thinking, for instance,
of the case of a deaf man who wishes at all costs to take a part in
social life, that is, to refuse to adopt the kind of behaviour that
seems to go with being deaf, to refuse to draw the usual con
clusions from the premise of his infirmity. In a word, this deaf
man refuses to shut himself in — he refuses to draw the blinds
against a certain kind of light. But what is this light? And where
does it come from? . . . May not this metaphor of light help us to
grasp the very essence of what we mean by truth ? But I will empha
size, in the first place, that it is more than a metaphor; or if it is
one, it is a metaphor woven' into the texture of my argument,
part of the pattern of the argument, not a mere incidental

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illustration of a point, as the other metaphors have been which
I have used so far, but of which I soon had to rid myself, since,
after easing its path for a moment, they soon obstructed the
progress of pure thought. Truth can dazzle and wound us as a
bright light does when we turn our eyes full on it ; and in ordin
ary language, we speak of men making themselves deliberately
blind to the truth, and so on. ...

It is nevertheless clear that we should pause at this point
to analyse just what we have in mind when we think of truth as
light. There would naturally be no sense in imagining, in a grossly
realistic fashion, that facts as such throw out a kind of light which
is the light of truth. The chief error of the philosophers of the
empiricist tradition has been, in fact, a failure to recognize what
a confused notion that of a fact is ; we may at any moment be
forced to treat as a fact, as we have seen only a short time ago,
something which is pure absence, like the fact of the non-
connoisseur's being shut off from certain realities. But it is time
to seek for another illustration of that idea, since the illustration
to which one clings too long tends to prow stale.

o o o

Let us think of somebody who has decided to enter a
religious community, to become a monk. But he has never
been clear in his own mind about what causes have led him to this
decision. He is on the eve of taking his final vows, there
is still time for him to renounce his purpose. It would be essential
at such a time that he should ask himself whether his vocation is in
fact an authentic one, whether he has really the sense of being
called by God to be God's servant. But in fact he dare not ask
that question directly, since he is afraid of the answer. In reality,
his decision has been taken after a long succession of purely
worldly disappointments — perhaps because a woman he loved
had deceived him, or because he had failed in a difficult examina
tion; perhaps also because he sees the obscure chance of obtaining,
as a monk, the respect of his family, who have so far always
thought him incapable of carrying through any design successfully.
But all this has obviously nothing to do with a vocation ; and
before taking an irrevocable step, he ought to open himself to the
light. But we are back to our problem: what is this light? Where

[63]

does it come from? Of the data which I have just enumerated, not
one can be regarded as being in itself a source of light. But under
what conditions might such a datum become one ?

Let us note well, before going further, that the great majority
of human beings grope about during their whole lives among
these data of their own existence rather as one gropes one's way
between heavy chairs and tables in a darkened room. And what
is tragic about their condition is that perhaps only because their
lives are passed in this shadowy gloom can they bear to live at
all. It is just as if their seeing apparatus had become finally adapted
to this twilight state : it is not a question of what Ibsen in The
Wild Duck calls the 'life-lie', it is a state of non-vision which is not,
however, a state of quite complete non-awareness. It can also be
said that the attention of such people is not directed towards the
data of their own existence, that they even make a point of
directing it elsewhere, and, indeed, this 'making a point' is as it
were the hidden spring that makes their lives tick on reasonably
bearably. One might express this in another way: all of us tend
to secrete and exude a sort of protective covering within which our

1 O

life goes on.

But to express oneself thus is still to postulate the existence
of a light which comes from outside and which it would be pos
sible to intercept. And yet we have seen distinctly that this idea is
absurd. It is necessary, however, to see just where its absurdity
lies.

It seems to me to consist in the first place in treating what
we call fact, whatever that may really be, as if it were something
placed outside me, in the sense in which some material body is, in
its case, outside my body, and placed, indeed, at a measurable
distance from that. It is against this idea of the fact as external to

o

me that we must direct our polemic. We must not hesitate to
affirm that the coherence of a fact, of any fact, is conferred on it
by the mind that grasps it, by the understanding self. There is
therefore every reason to suppose that if this fact, or this collec
tion of data, should possess the strange power of irradiation of
which I have spoken, it would be from the understanding self
that it had borrowed the power, rather than possessing such a
power intrinsically itself: the latter supposition, I repeat, is

[64]

absurd. But at this point it seems that we are falling into an
inextricable confusion. How can I, as an understanding self, shut
myself against a light which, as we have just seen, does not come
strictly speaking from the facts themselves, but from myself who
have conferred upon them this strange power of radiation ? If this
is the case, we must acknowledge that what we call a fact is only
an inert, neutral element, and that everything that really seems
to be a relation between my understanding and the facts is really
a relation between me and myself. Only at this point we are once
more forced to recognize the ambiguity of the term 'self, its
profound lack, in fact, of self-identity; the self which confers
what I shall henceforth call a reverberatory power on facts does
not seem to be identical with the self which refuses to let itself
be penetrated by that power. But they are both my self.

Yet again, at this juncture, let us beware of being deceived
by language. When I speak of a non-coincidence between the self
which confers a power and the self which refuses to be penetrated
by the power, I do not really mean that I have two selves. As I
have already observed, that would be the case only if we were
dealing with objects, and in consequence could treat what we are
discussing here as a matter of elements that could be labelled and
numbered off: this self, that self. But that is just what is obviously
impossible. We are forced once more to make a distinction here
between the notions of difference and duality, and to protest
against everyday language, which, having to do above all with
physical objects, inevitably contributes to the confusion of
difference with duality. This is not all ; we must also beware of
interpreting what has been said about the reverberatory power
of facts and its source in causal terms. All that I have said needs
to be written out again with more care or, if you like, transposed
into a key that will leave no room for any misunderstanding.

It might be interesting to go back, for the sake of clarity, to
the case of the religious novice which I brought up a short time
ago. If we wanted to treat that example adequately, it would have
to be in the manner of a novelist; for it would be the novelist's
business to make concrete, and to give their proper respective
weight to, the various data which I presented in a schematic
fashion. But to achieve this the novelist would have to present

F [6J]

the surroundings in which such a character has lived, and make
clear the exact kind of pressure these surroundings have exercised
on him ; that is how we would be enabled to understand how in
this case a failure or a romantic disappointment, which in some
body else's case might have been incidents hardly worth men
tioning, have in this case assumed a tragic importance. How can
we apply this with precision to what I have said earlier on in a
more abstract fashion about the fact's not being external? It is
quite clear that the fact only acquires its value as a fact because
it is referred to that living centre, the character in our imaginary
novel. Referred, I say: the term 'represented', which is generally
current in idealist philosophy, is inadequate. It may be that the
would-be monk in our story suffered because of realities which
he had not managed to represent to himself; these realities had
nevertheless become digested into the tissue of his life. Only it is
a question here of what I may call a dematerialized digestion,
comparable to the allusions to or reminiscences from other
poems which a poet may introduce into an original work : a good
example is Mr. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

A question, or rather an objection, can hardly fail at this
moment to spring to the reader's mind. I have turned my novice
into a character in a novel : but is it not, in fact, only at the level
of the work of imagination, such as the novel is, that the totality
of facts is really referred to a sort of living centre and thus
appears to be, as it were, interiorized ? But I reply that the proper
function of the novelist consists exclusively of enabling us to get
a more distinct grip on that unity which, of course, existed in life
before it existed in fiction, and which makes fiction possible.
The novelist communicates directly to us something which
ordinary conditions of life condemn us merely to glance at. But
the novelist is in no sense the inventor of this sort of unity ; and
the greater a novelist is, the more he gives us the sense that he is
not making anything up. I quote Charles Du Bos on Tolstoy's
War and Peace : 'Life would speak thus, if life could speak'. I have
no hesitation for my own part in saying that it is through the
novelist's power of creation that we can get our best glimpse of
what lies behind and under the reverberatory power of facts.

Could it not be said that this power implies the existence of

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a certain uncompleted structure — a structure essentially uncom
pleted since its foundations are in space and time ? This structure
extends on all sides beyond such a direct awareness as the self
can have ; and that awareness — a point on which we shall expatiate
later — is not and cannot be shut in on itself. The less, in fact,
we think of the self as a monad, the more we shall emphasize the
importance of this uncompleted structure extending beyond the
self. We shall also have to acknowledge the intimate affinities that
exist between this structure and the body in the ordinary sense
of the word, in so far as for the self the body is this body, my body.
It is in connection with this structure that the problem of truth
can and must be raised ; I mean that if we were to do something
that cannot be done, and sweep the idea of this structure away,
the idea of truth would at the same time lose its meaning. We
have now reached a central point in our investigation. But per
haps it will not be unprofitable to recur here to the traditional
notion of the relation between truth and judgment and to see
how it looks in the light of the preceding explanations.

Let us first of all notice that from this point of view, what
I have called 'fact' can be regarded as a property of our postulated
structure; it is in some sense integrated into the structure, and
it is for this reason that it can become radiant — always allowing,
as we have seen, that the self disposes itself in relation to the
radiant fact so as to receive the light that streams from it. I have
already had occasion to remark how much we are in danger of
being misled by the use of verbs like 'receive' in such a connec
tion. The difficulties, indeed, that have accumulated round the
notion of truth are in a large part due to the embarrassment we
feel when we seek to define this essential act of the 'reception'
of truth. Let us say in a very general way that at this level the
contrast between activity and passivity — between reception, say,
considered as taking, and reception considered as being given
something — loses a great deal of its meaning ; in the dimension in
which we now find ourselves, we must move beyond such
categories.

Once again I shall choose an illustration that will enable us to
see exactly what the place of judgment is. Think of a mother and
father who, after deceiving themselves for a long time about their

[67]

son, are forced to admit that he is abnormal; so far, in every
particular case, they have made an effort to find explanations for
his behaviour that would allow them to believe that, fundament
ally, he is just 'like other children'. But there comes a moment
when they are brought face to face with the painful truth. When

J o F

we say that somebody is forced to 'face' the truth, the expression
we use is extraordinarily full of meaning, and it is important to
bring out all its implications. It is obvious that the notion of
'facing' the truth implies a kind of activity; we talk, for instance,
about people having the courage to face the truth. But nobody
will admit that courage can be anything else but active : and this
is true, of course, even of the courage which consists of bearing
some misfortune patiently. But at the same time — and it is here
the paradox lies — the idea of courage is intimately linked to that
of 'having no alternative', an idea which, if it were presented in
isolation, would be equivalent to an idea of mere and pure con
straint. The mother and father, for instance, in the illustration I
have just given, 'have no alternative but to . . .' But if the parents,
in this case, are obliged to recognize their child's deficiency, do
not let us forget that an obligation is always something which
can be evaded to some degree. I would recall to you the character
Rose Deeprose, in Sheila Kaye-Smith's fine novel of that name,
who refuses to the last to admit that her child is an idiot, since,
if she did make this admission, she would be obliged to put the
child in an institution. In extreme cases, we are forced to ask
ourselves — but it is a point on which psychiatrists would be able
to enlighten us — whether what we call madness may not be, in
some instances, a sort of flight from necessity.

The truth is that an obligation is something that always ought
to be recognized, and that this recognition is an act. But on the
other hand it does not look as if an act of this sort can ever be
what is properly called a spontaneous act. It is necessary, one
might say, that the facts should exercise a sort of dumb pressure
on the self which will force the self, if I may put it so, to recognize
the obligation which lies upon it to recognize the facts them
selves. . . .

There is thus an extremely subtle reciprocal interlinking
between facts and self that comes into existence every time we

[68]

recognize a mortifying truth. And obviously I am far from claim
ing that every truth has necessarily a mortifying character; but
for the purposes of this analysis it is interesting to concentrate
on truths of this sort, if only because it is in such cases that it is
most difficult to understand how truth can be loved.

But there is one obvious point that can be made here ; it is
that after I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a pain
ful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it ;
the essential quality of this consolation lies in the fact that, by
opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to
a long and exhausting inner struggle. But what sort of struggle
was it? Let us recall some points we have previously made. We
cannot properly talk of a struggle against the facts ; for let me
repeat it, the facts have no existence or power that is intrinsic to
themselves ; we ought to talk, rather of a struggle against oneself.
Here again we find that ambiguity in the notion of the self which
I have so often remarked on : the self that is all desire has been
fighting against what I shall from now on call the spirit of truth.

But what is it in the self that feels this consolation, this sense
of liberation, which is certainly felt when a painful truth has
been recognized? Can we think of this spirit of truth as itself
capable of feeling joy — or of feeling pain? And on the other hand
is it not a contradiction in terms that the desiring self, which has
in a sense been conquered in the battle, should feel a strange
satisfaction in its own defeat? Must we at this point insert some
third, mediating term — shall we speak of a self which is neither
the desiring self nor the spirit of truth? But who can fail to
recognize that this dissociation within the self is artificial and
that we cannot isolate, in order to transform them into distinct
entities, the various aspects of a single life, which is, precisely,
the life of one self? What we have to grasp — and we can only
succeed in doing so by exorcizing every deceptive metaphor — is
that, in the light of truth, I succeed in diminishing that permanent
temptation that assails me to conceive reality, or to represent it
to myself, as I should like it to be. In the light of truth, in the
presence of truth ; it is just — however obscure this may seem — as
if this truth possessed a stimulating power, as if it were able to
purify me, as a sea wind can or the piney tang of the forests. But

[69]

these are only comparisons and they cannot really help us. The
essential question remains and it obviously has a dominating part
to play in this dark and difficult investigation. It is this : has truth
a substance that is proper to it ? Are we in the right in considering
it, as our most recent metaphors have suggested, as a distinct
power which can be given or lent to us in exchange for the diffi
cult and praiseworthy act of opening ourselves to it? It is very
clear that if this were the case we should grasp much more clearly
than we have so far succeeded in doing, just how it is possible to
love truth, and even to sacrifice oneself for truth. But after all, if
we conceive truth in this way, are we not falling into a sort of
mythology, and in our recent investigations into the idea of a
structure have we not prepared ourselves to form a wholly
different idea of truth — an idea of truth as strictly immanent?

However, this is just the moment to remind ourselves of
what we said earlier about the impossibility of accepting, in these
lectures, the opposition between the ideas of the immanent and
the transcendent in its elementary form. It follows that there may
perhaps be no absolute contradition between the two aspects of
truth with which we are here confronted.

Heidegger, in that essay to which I alluded at the beginning
of this lecture, has emphasized the importance of the notion of
openness for any theory of truth — or the notion perhaps of being
opened. His German word is 'Offenstandigkeit', and the French
translators have coined 'aperite' as an equivalent. What he is
really trying to do is to find a basis in possibility for that adequation
of the mind and the thing which constitutes a true judgment as
such. Here is a piece of metal : I describe it correctly when I say
that such is its shape, such its colour, such its market value, and
so on. Allowing that my description is an exact one, the meaning
of 'exactness' in this sense is just what Heidegger is out to define.
A judgment about a thing, in so far as it is an adequate judgment,
establishes in regard to the thino; the particular relation that can be
expressed by the formula: such . . . that ... (It is such a thing
that it has certain qualities, it is such an X that it is also a Y.)
The essence of this relation is what Heidegger calls, not represen
tation, but appresentation. To appresent is 'to allow the thing
to surge up before us in the guise of this or that object, but in such

[70]

a fashion that the judgment lets itself be led by the thing and
expresses it just as it has presented itself. It is a necessary condi
tion of all appresentation that the appresentating being should be
placed in the middle of a light that will allow something to appear
to that being, be to made manifest to it. This "something" must
span or traverse a domain open to our encounter'.

The fundamental agreement between these views and those
that I have been previously expounding should be obvious. What
we have still to discover is whether our explanations meet the
whole case, and whether they enable us to make a definitive
judgment on the possibility of treating truth as an effective
power. We must be wary here, since we are exposed to the old
danger of creating fictitious entities out of phrases. It is all too
clear on the basis of my assumption that there is something called
the love of truth, that I shall be tempted to give it the status of an
entity : I may try to link up the love of truth in my mind, for in
stance, with the love of God. There is a whole theological back
ground there, that is likely to affect our thinking without our
wanting it to and without our even being distinctly aware that
it is doincr so ; and we should be very wary of its intrusions. I do
not say that, after a long divagation, we may not have to redis
cover this background in the end. But would it not be very rash,
for instance, to attribute to the love of truth, as it exists in the
ordinary learned man, a religious character?

On the one hand, it seems pretty certain that the learned
man — I am thinking particularly of the scientists, with the pos
sible exception of the mathematical scientist — -does postulate the
identity of what is and what is true; his task really is, in fact, to
discover what is, what is the case, for instance what is the con
stitution of matter. But, on the other hand, though truth and being
are identical for him from that point of view, is his love of truth
really a love of being? Does not the love of be ing always have a note
about it of reverence? Is it not a love of what is created in so far
as that is the veiled expression, or the token, of the presence of
the creator? It would, I think, be quite arbitrary to attribute to
scientists and learned men generally a reverent attitude of this
sort ; one would have to admit that if this attitude does exist in
most scientists, not only are they not aware of it, but, more often

than not, it is in opposition with their professed beliefs, or rather
non-beliefs. It seems to me that in the scientist's own eyes his
love for truth can be reduced to a passionate interest in research
as such, and also, as a rather more remote consideration, an
unbounded confidence in the social utility of research. Let us
suppose, however — and unfortunately in our world today no
supposition is more plausible — that the scientist is called upon
by the State or the Party to deny or renounce some conclusion
to which his researches have led him; let us suppose that he
refuses and risks being sent to a concentration camp ; what exactly
will be the mainspring of the heroic stand he is taking? There we
have the problem that has been worrying us all along, stated as
concretely as can be. The problem is harder to solve in this case
because there is something, most probably, in the structure of the
scientist's mind (as a non-philosopher's, a non-believer's mind)
that prevents him from asking himself this question ; reflection
in our sense of the word is something deeply alien to him. As
philosophers, or students of philosophy, we are in danger of
solving his problem for him by bringing in something which runs
against the very grain of his mind.

What he refuses to do is to recant. But what exactly are we
to understand by that? A superficial mind will say that this is a
mere matter of self-respect, or even of pride, though no doubt
proper pride; if he were to recant, he would be humiliating
himself. But this is certainly a false interpretation, by which I
mean that it is not true to the scientist's own experience. For
him, it is not himself that is at stake, but truth : the truth of which
he is an interpreter and to which in a certain sense he bears
witness. If he were to recant, he would be perjuring himself.
But it is just the nature of this treason that he shrinks from, that
we must make clear. He would be betraying truth ; but, or so it
would seem, we can only betray a person; is truth a person, can
it be compared to a person? We do talk indeed of sinning against
the light, but has this any meaning outside that world of religious
experience, which we wish, as I have said, to exclude for the
moment from our discussion?

Ought we not to recur here to one of the deepest notions of
the Californian philosopher, Josiah Royce, and to say that the

[72]

man who is engaged in the search for truth enters into an ideal

o o

community? He becomes a citizen of a city that is not built with
stones and that is cemented only with thought. But is it not
against this city that the scientist is committing a treason when,
out of fear or out of self-interest, he recants the conclusions that
he reached in the days when he served truth loyally?

That conclusion cannot be lightly set aside; it will obtain
the support of many thinkers who have little taste for metaphysics
as such. Nevertheless, I think it takes us only half-way to the
truth. The notion of this ideal city is only a halt, or a ledge, on a
steep, stony mountain path that must lead us much further on.
For we are still left with the problem of how such a city is possible
and what are its foundations. Is it not the main note of this city
that it has been constructed with truth in mind and for the
purposes of truth? But that leaves the whole problem where it
was. It may be, however, that if we can once more probe through
mere words and images, this notion of an ideal city will help us
upwards on the path towards a more distinct conception than we
have yet obtained of our destination.

What are we to understand by an ideal city? Let us put aside
every characteristic that belongs specifically to a material city.
What remains is the idea of a place where people live together
and where exchanges of goods and services of all sorts take place.
Certainly, when we talk of such exchanges, we evoke once more
an image of physical transactions. I bring along some banknotes
and I buy an object which has a stated price. But, after all, there
are other exchanges of an infinitely more subtle kind. I go into
a museum, for instance, and I bring with me a certain number of
ideas, or rather a preliminary grounding of experience, which
enables me to understand, or rather to appreciate, works of art
that might otherwise have left me indifferent. It may be objected
that it is improper to speak of an exchange in this instance, since
I 'give' nothing to the work of art; but that is only true from a
grossly material point of view. There is a deeper sense in which one
can say that the work is enriched by the admiration it inspires
and that it undergoes, in a sense, a real growth and development.
This mysterious phenomenon — which cannot, of course, leave
any palpable traces — belongs, in a way, to the ideal city. Let us

[73]

notice, in passing, that a town, when it deserves the name of a
town, and is not a mere juxtaposition of buildings, has itself
something of the function of the museum; it offers spiritual
nourishment to those who live in it, and they in their turn help
on the growth of what one might call its spiritual substance.

Let us see how these very simple remarks can throw some
light on the notion of the ideal city itself and on its connections
with the notion of truth.

As always, we have been tempted to cling to a physical
representation. Just as the city of stone or wood is laid out to get
the best light available, so we have imagined the ideal city as
constructed in such a fashion that it can be illuminated by a truth
that is external to it. But the relationship is not the same in both
cases ; where the city of stone or wood seems to have a prior
existence in itself without the light being a necessary constituent
part of that existence, the ideal city, as we have glimpsed, does
draw its verv existence from that other li^ht which is truth. This

J O

certainly gives us only a very abstract and general grasp of what
we are talking about, but it is enough to show how impossible
it would be to represent the ideal city in an objective fashion.
The best image, indeed, that we can here evoke that city by, is
the simple one of a discussion about ideas in which both the
conversationalists are so interested in their topic that each forgets
about himself, which is to say, really, about the personal impres
sion TTeis making on the other; for the tiniest touch of self-
complacency would lower the tone of the discussion. The very
soul of such discussions is the joy of communicating, not neces
sarily the joy of finding that one's views agree with another's;
and this distinction between communication and agreement has
great importance. It is just as if two climbers were tackling the
same hill, up different approaches ; allowing that the climbers can
communicate directly with each other, at any moment, through
portable radio or television sets.

But there is something paradoxical in this situation, even
when our imagination has grasped it properly. Truth is at once
what the two conversationalists, or the two climbers, are aware
of striving towards — and it is also what pushes them up their hill ;
which is to say that it is at once in front of them and behind them,

[74]

or rather that, at this level of discourse, this spatial contrast has
no reality.

Has all this brought us nearer to the discovery of what truth
is ? My reflections on what I have called the ideal city, or merely
on what is involved in the notion of a sincere discussion between
two persons, should lead us to acknowledge, it seems to me, that
when we talk of truth — just because we are talking of it — we run
a grave risk of placing ourselves just at the most unfavourable
standpoint for grasping what truth may be. You will notice that in
the illustrations which have taken up so much of this lecture I
have always been anxious to flow in the direction of a sort of
current, without asking myself precisely what the current is,
what are its characteristics, for instance whether it is a continuous
current — as Bergson seems to have thought, who in this instance
does seem to me to have taken a large leap beyond the given facts
of experience. And this notion of a 'current', taken in isolation,
does not seem to me a completely satisfactory notion. What I
mean is that I have been dealing with thought in so far as thought
is committed to some task or other, and I have not been asking
myself exactly how thought gets such tasks suggested to it. But
all this comes down to saying that to me it does not appear per
missible to isolate a judgment and to ask what truth is in relation
to that judgment. We have been led in this lecture, and we shall
be led more and more in subsequent lectures, to give weight to
the idea of a sort of Intercourse, which can take place both be
tween distinct personalities and within what we call the same
personality. This will become clearer later on, when we shall have
to define the specific characteristics of intersubjectivity. We
have already got a glimpse, however, of the fact that all intercourse
takes place against what I would call a kind of intelligible back
ground; there would be everything to lose if we were tempted
to transform this notion of an intelligible background into the

o o

image of a material background ; though that temptation is, in
our case, with us "all the time. But though this notion of an
intelligible background, or setting, is still a misty one, does it not
permit us to give a certain body of meaning to the phrase 'within
the bounds of truth' which we used earlier in this lecture? Even
more, might we not have a basis for supposing that what we call

[7S]

]

the love of truth may be a sort of mysterious joy in moving against
this intelligible background, within this intelligible setting?
Though the joy certainly is a precarious and threatened one.

For if it is the case that we have access to this region only
under rather difficult conditions, and under conditions on which
we cannot concentrate our attention too firmly, we can certainly
not say that we are 'native to the place', that we naturally belong
there. This intelligible region is not our natal soil fit is not so, at
least, unless we can conceive a double mode of belonging, or
unless, in a quite different fashion, we can think of ourselves, as
X \Plato /did, as linked to this region by mysterious threads of
reminiscence. But at a first glance we have to admit that this is a
strange notion, and that we cannot yet attribute to it anything
more than a negative content; we see what it is not, much rather
than grasp what it is.

We are thus led to the world we do naturally belong to,
the world of our sense experiences, the world that constitutes
us as existing creatures. And it is only very much later that we
shall be able to return to the difficult notions which, towards the
end of this lecture, had begun to beckon us with a distant gleam.

|76]

CHAPTER V

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY REFLECTION
THE EXISTENTIAL FULCRUM

TH E questions about the nature of truth that took up our
whole attention during the last lecture were certainly
difficult and involved, and at a first glance it may seem strange
that we should have raised them at all before turning to our

O

present topic. But it seemed to me that a first examination of how
we ought to understand the notion of truth was a necessary
preliminary to everything else. That intelligible background or
setting, of which we spoke towards the end of our last lecture,
however hard it may be to grasp it in its essential nature^) is
nevertheless, (since it is not merely a place of encounter, but, as
we shall gradually see more and more clearly, communication
and will to communicate,) the setting against which our
investigation must spread itself out. It may be objected that it is
also the setting for every kind of thought that is worthy of the
name of thought. Agreed: but the distinctive note of philosophic
thought, at least according to my conception of it and I have many
authorities for that conception, is that not only does it move
towards the object whose nature it seeks to discover, but at the
same time it is alert for a certain music that arises from its own
inner nature if it is succeeding in carrying out its task. We have
already said that the point about philosophic thought is that it is
reflective ; and it is into the nature of reflection, as an activity,
that we must now probe more deeply than we have done so far.

As usual, I shall start with the simplest examples I can find,
to show how reflection has its roots in the daily flow of life.

I put my hand, let us say, into my pocket to take my watch
out. I discover that my watch is not there ; but it ought to be there ;
normally my watch is in my pocket. I experience a slight shock.

[77]

There has been a small break in the chain of my everyday habits
(between the act of putting my hand in my pocket and that of
taking out my watch). The break is felt as something out of the
way; it arrests my attention, to a greater or a less degree, accord
ing to the importance I attach to my watch; the notion that a
valuable object may be lost arises in my mind, and this notion is
not a mere notion but also a feeling of disquiet. I call in reflection
to help me . . . but let us be careful here not to fall into the
errors of an out-of-date psychology which isolated one faculty of
the mind from another. It is very clear in the example I have
chosen, and in every similar example, that reflection is nothing
other than attention, in the case where attention is directed
towards this sort of small break in the daily chain of habit. To
reflect, in this kind of case, is to ask oneself how such a break
can have occurred. But there is no place here for the kind of
purely abstract speculation which, of its very nature, can have no
practical outcome ; what I have to do is to go back in time until
I recall the moment when the watch was last in my possession. I
remember, let us say, having looked at the time just after break
fast; therefore at that moment everything was still all right.
Between then and now something must have happened to the
watch. My mental processes are rather like — there is no avoiding
the comparison — the actions of a plumber who is trying to trace
a leak. Was there perhaps a hole in my pocket? I look at my
pocket and discover that there is no hole. I continue with my task
of alert recapitulation. Say that I succeed in recalling the fact that
there was a moment when I put the watch down on a table; I
shall go, of course, to see whether it is still on the table; and
there, let us say, the watch still is. Reflection has carried out its
task, and the problem is solved. . . . Let us notice, however, even
in connection with this almost childishly simple example, that
I have made my mental dfort because something real, something
valuable, was at stake. [Reflection is never exercised on things
that are not worth the trouble of reflecting aboutj And, from
another point of view, let us notice that reflection in this case
was a personal act, and an act which nobody else would have
been able to undertake in my place, or on my behalf. The act of
reflection is linked, as bone is linked with bone in the human

[78]

body, to living personal experience; and it is important to
understand the nature of this link. To all appearances, it is neces
sary that the living personal experience should bump into some
sort of obstacle. One is tempted to use the following sort of
metaphor. A man who has been travelling on foot arrives at the
edge of a river where the bridge has been carried away by a flood.
He has no option but to call a ferryman. In an example such as that
which I have just cited, reflection does really play the part of the
ferryman.

But the same sort of thing can happen, of course, at the level
of the inner life. I am talking to a friend, and somehow I let myself
be drawn into telling him something which is an actual lie. I am
alone with myself again, I get a grip on myself, I face the fact of
this lie ; how was it possible for me to tell such a whopper? I am
all the more surprised at myself because I have been accustomed
to think of myself, up to the present, as a truthful and trustworthy
person. But then what importance ought I to attach to this lie?
Am I forced to conclude that I am not the man I thought I was ?

O

And, from another point of view, what attitude ought I to take up
towards this act of mine? Ought I to confess the lie to my friend,

o J

or on the other hand would I make myself ridiculous by doing
so? But perhaps I ought to make myself ridiculous, to let my
friend laugh at me, as a sort of punishment for having told him the
lie in the first place?

As in the previous example, what we have here is a kind of
break ; that is to say, I cannot go on just as if nothing had happened ;
there really is something that necessitates an act of readjustment
on my part.

But here is a third example that will give us an easier access
to the notion of reflection at the properly philosophical level.
I have been disappointed by the behaviour of somebody of whom
I was fond. So I am forced to revise my opinion of this friend of
mine. It seems, indeed, that I am forced to acknowledge that he
is not the man I believed him to be. But it may be that the process
of reflection does not halt there. A memory comes back to me —
a memory of something I myself did long ago, and suddenly I
ask myself: 'Was this act of mine really so very different from
the act which today I feel inclined to judge so severely? But in

[79]

that case am I in any position to condemn my friend?' Thus my
reflections, at this point, call my own position into question.
Let us consider this second stage. Here, again, I cannot go on as
if nothing had happened. Then, what has happened? There has
been this memory and this sort of confrontation that has been
forced upon me, of myself and the person I was judging so
harshly. But what does 'myself' mean here? The point is that I
have been forced to ask myself what 1 am worth, how true
I ring. So far I had taken myself, so to speak, for granted, I quite
naturally thought of myself as qualified to judge and eventually to
condemn. Or perhaps even that is not quite the case: I used to
behave or, what comes to the same thing, I used to talk like a
man qualified to judge others. In my heart of hearts, I did not really
think of myself as such a man . . Here, for the moment at least,
this process of reflection may terminate. Such reflections may
leave me in a mood of anguish, and nevertheless I have a certain
sense of being set free, the sense of which I spoke in the last
lecture : it is as if I had overturned some obstruction in my way.

But at this point a twofold and important realization is
forced upon me ; on the one hand, I am now able to communicate
at a broader level with myself, since I have, as it were, introduced
the self that committed the dubious act to the self that did not
hesitate to set itself up as the harsh judge of such acts in others ;
and on the other hand — and this cannot be a mere coincidence —
I am now able to enter into far more intimate communication
with my friend, since between us there no longer stands that
barrier which separates the judge on the bench from the accused
man in the dock.

We have here a very striking illustration of that important
notion of intercourse, on which I was expatiating the other day,
and no doubt we shall later have to remember this illustration
when we begin to discuss the topic of intersubjectivity properly
so called.

But meanwhile there are certain other observations on the
relations between reflection and life that are pertinent at this
point. There is a kind of philosophy, essentially romantic, or at
least romantic in its roots, which very willingly contrasts reflec
tion and life, sets them at opposite poles from each other; and

[80]

it is permissible to notice that this contrast, or this opposition, is
often stated in metaphors of heat and cold. Reflection, because it
is critical, is cold; it not only puts a bridle on the vital impulses,
it freezes them. Let us, in this case too, take a concrete example.
A young man has let himself be drawn into saying rash

J o Jo

things to a girl. It was during a dance, he was intoxicated by the
atmosphere, by the music, the girl herself was a girl of unusual
beauty. The dance is over, he comes home, he feels the intoxica
tion of the evening wearing away. To his sobered mood, reflec
tion does present itself, in such a case, as something purely and
merely critical : what is this adventure going to lead to ? He has

J o o

not the sort of job that would make marriage a reasonable
proposition; if he were to marry this girl, they would have to
lead a narrow, constricted life ; what would become of love in
such sordid circumstances ? And so on, and so on ... It is obvious
that in such cases reflection is like the plunge under an icy shower
that wakens one from a pleasant morning dreaminess. But it would
be very rash to generalize from such examples, and even in regard
to this particular example we ought to ask ourselves rather care
fully what real relationship between reflection and life it illus
trates. For I think we must be on our guard against a modern way
of interpreting life as pure spontaneity. For that matter, I am not
sure that spontaneity is, for the philosopher, a really distinct
notion; it lies somewhere on these shadowy borders where
psychology and biology run into each other and merge. The young
Spanish philosopher, Julian Marias, has something relevant and
useful to say about this in his Introduction to Philosophy .* He says
that the verb 'to live' has no doubt a precise meaning, a meaning
that can be clearly formulated, when it is applied, say, to a sheep
or a shark : it means to breathe by means of this organ and not that
(by lungs or gills, as the case may be), to be nourished in such and
such a fashion (by preying on other fish, by cropping grass), and
so on. But when we are talking about human life the verb 'to
live' cannot have its meaning so strictly circumscribed ; the notion
of human life cannot be reduced to that of the harmonious
functioning of a certain number of organs, though that purely
biological functioning is, of course, presupposed in the notion of

^Introduction a la Philosophic. Madrid, 1947
G [Si]

human life. For instance, a prisoner who has no hope of getting
out of jail may say without exaggeration — though he continues
to breathe, to eat, to perform all his natural functions — that his
existence is not really a life. The mother of an airman might say
in wartime, 'While my son is risking his life, I am not really
living'. All this is enough to make it clear that a human life has
always its centre outside itself; though it can be centred, cer
tainly, on a very wide and diverse range of outside interests. It
may be centred on a loved one, and with the disappearance of the
loved one be reduced to a sad caricature of itself; it may be
centred on something trivial, a sport like hunting, a vice like
gambling; it can be centred on some high activity, like research
or creation. But each one of us can ask himself, as a character in
one of my plays does, 'What do I live by?' And this is not a matter
so much of some final purpose to which a life may be directed as
of the mental fuel that keeps a life alight from day to day. For
there are, as we know only too well, desperate creatures who
waste away, consuming themselves like lamps without oil.

But from this point of view, from the human point of view,
we can no longer think of life as mere and pure spontaneity — and
by the same token we can no longer think of reflection as life's
antagonist. On the contrary, it seems to me essential that we
should grasp the fact that reflection is still part of life, that it is
one of the ways in which life manifests itself, or, more profoundly,
that it is in a sense one of life's ways of rising from one level to

J o

another. That, in fact, is the very point of the last few examples
we have been taking. We should notice also that reflection can
take many different shapes and that even conversion can be, in the
last analysis, a sort of reflective process; consider the hero of
Tolstoy's 'Resurrection or even Raskolnikov in Crime and Punish
ment. We can say therefore that reflection appears alien to life, or
opposed to life, only if we are reducing the concept of human life
to, as it were, a manifestation of animality. But it must be added
that if we do perform this act of reduction, then reflection itself
becomes an unintelligible concept; we cannot even conceive by
what sort of a miracle reflection could be grafted on mere
animality.

[82]

So much for the relations between reflection and life; we
would reach similar conclusions about the relations between
reflection and experience, and this links up with what has been
previously said. If I take experience as merely a sort of passive
recording of impressions, I shall never manage to understand how
the reflective process could be integrated with experience. lOn I
the other hand, |the more we grasp the notion of experience in
its proper complexity, in its active and I would even dare to say
in its dialectical aspects, the better we shall understand how
experience cannot fail to transform itself into reflection, and we
shall even have the right to say that the more richly it is exper- /

ience, the more, also, it is reflection.jJBut we must, at this pointy j

take one step more and grasp the Tact that reflection itself can
manifest itself at various levels ; there is primary reflection, and
there is also what I shall call secondary reflection ; this secondary
reflection has, in fact, been very often at work during these early
lectures, and I dare to hope that as our task proceeds it will
appear more and more clearly as the special high instrument of
philosophical research. Roughly, we can say that where primary
reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first
put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially
recuperative ; it reconquers that unity. But how is such a recon-
quest possible? The possibility is what we are going to try to
show by means of the quite general, the (in the parliament
ary sense') privileged, example on which we must now concentrate
our attention. We shall soon see that what we have to deal with
here is not merely, in fact, an illustration or an example, but
an actual fway of access to a realm that is assuredly as near to us as
can be, but that nevertheless, by a fatality (a perfectly explicable
fatality, however), has been, through the influence of modern
thought, set at a greater and greater distance from us; so that
the realm has become more and more of a problematic realm, and
we are forced to call its very existence into question. I am talking
about the self, about that reality of the self, with which we have
already come in contact so often, but always to be struck by its
disquieting ambiguity.

We are now embarking upon the question on which, really,

[83]

all the other questions hang: it is the question I put when I ask
myself who I am and, more deeply still, when I probe into my
meaning in asking myself that question.

There is a remark which, in such a setting, may appear
trifling and even farcical; yet it is interesting, one must say it, at
this point to remind ourselves of how very often nowadays we are
called upon to fill in forms establishing what is called our identity.
The multiplication of such forms today is significant, and its
causes should be looked into; it is tied up, of course, with that
growth of bureaucracy we have already spoken of. That growth
has a sinister, metaphysical significance, though that significance,
apart from such a writer as Kafka and his more thoughtful readers,
is not yet generally recognized. My point now is that when one fills
in such a form one has a silly feeling — as if one were putting on
fancy dress, not to go to a costume ball, but to set about one's
daily labours. The most precise fashion in which I can express
this feeling in general terms is as follows : I have not a conscious
ness of being the person who is entered under the various headings
thus: son of, born at, occupation, and so on. Yet everything I enter
under these headings is strictly true ; I should be guilty of telling a
lie if I varied the entries from form to form, and, besides that,
I would be risking serious trouble. If this form-filling is a game,
it is a game I am forced to play. But what is really remarkable is
that the filling in of any such form whatsoever would give me
the same silly feeling, unless, for a single moment, I could exer
cise my creative faculty by inventing an identity of my own choice ;
only the strange thing is that after a short time this invented
identity, if I were forced to stick to it, would give me a feeling
of peculiar, intimate disgust — like some shabby garment, not
my own, that I was forced to drag around with me everywhere.
It is, in fact, against the existence of such garments that I have to
protest: /am not this garment. ... A mental specialist might say
that we are here on a dangerous path that can lead to mythomania
or even actual insanity. But such a remark has a merely practical
value, and is irrelevant to our present speculative discussion.
The point I want to make now is that this feeling about identity
forms that I have been talking about is no doubt completely
foreign to many people: by why? Must we say that such people

quite lack the sense of fantasy ? I think we can go further and say
that the absence of this uneasiness must be linked to a total
deficiency as far as the faculty of creation is concerned. Later on,
we shall see more clearly why this is so.

Let us try to imagine, now, the sheer dumbfoundedness of
the civil servant who, on asking me, 'So you are Mr. So-and-so?'
received the curt reply, 'Certainly not'. He would arrive at only
one of two conclusions : either this person is insane, or he is
passing under a false identity. But what is quite certaip is that he
would never begin to suspect that for me and him the verb 'to
be' in that sentence — ' Are you Mr. So-and-so?' — has a quite
different meaning. If I am a person of common sense, therefore,
I shall try not to step outside the very narrow limits in which what
such a creature calls his mind functions, and to stick loyally to his
categories, to the headings on the form which he wishes me to
fill up, however rudimentary these categories may appear to me
to be.

But in compensation there is nothing to stop me personally
from facing up to the strange duality which seems to be implied
in the uneasiness with which I regard an identity form, and asking
myself certain direct questions : if I cannot satisfy myself by
saying, 'I am Mr. So-and-so, the son of Mr. So-and-So, living in
Paris or wherever it may be', what then is the urgent inner need
which makes me aware of this dissatisfaction? Really, who am I?

I should like to observe, in the first place, that the question
put by the civil servant — 'So you', let us say, 'are Mr. So-and-so,
and these are your particulars?' — has to do with somebody or
other, or rather with some one definite somebody, of whom one
might say that he springs to attention, as a soldier does, when his
number is called out. It is just as if somebody had said to me:
'State the identity of Number 98', and as if I had the job of
answering for this unfortunate Number 98 — as if Number 98,
were illiterate for instance, and so could not fill in the form, or
were deaf, and so could not hear the question. But I, who am
forced to answer for Number 98, who am I, really? The real
fact, the thing that complicates the whole business, that is, the
truth of it, is that I am myself and not somebody else; if I were
somebody else, the question would be put again, when my turn

came up, but it would still be exactly the same sort of question.
There is thus, or so it seems to me, a sense in which I am not a
definite somebody; from the moment when I start to reflect, I
am bound to appear to myself as a, as it were, non-somebody linked
in a profoundly obscure fashion, with a somebody about whom I
am being questioned and about whom I am certainly not free to
answer just what I like at the moment when I am being questioned.

These are the conclusions at which we can arrive after a
first examination of our topic. We shall certainly have to go beyond
them. Nevertheless, they throw some light on an aspect of the
situation which we cannot pass over without some further
comment.

It is only in so far as I assert myself to be, in one sense, not
merely a somebody, that I can acknowledge two facts ; firstly, that
there is another sense in which I am a somebody, a particular
individual (though not merely that), and secondly that other
somebodies, other particular individuals, also exist. Let us point
out that a solipsistic type of idealism would never be able to grasp
the fact of my existence, in so far as it is a somebody's existence,
neither do I possess any particular ontological privilege in
relation to all the other somebodies ; indeed, one may go further,
it is obvious that if I am a somebody, a particular individual, I am
only so at once in connection with and in opposition to an inde
finite number of other somebodies ; and this enables us to solve
a priori, and without any trouble at all, a problem which the
philosophers of the past have woven into wantonly intricate
tangles : the problem of how I can be certain that anybody, or
anything, other than myself, exists.

In compensation, we have still a paradox of our own to
play with, the central fact that I appear to myself both as a some
body and not a somebody, a particular individual and not a partic
ular individual, and at this point we must probe a little more
deeply into that paradox. Can we get a closer grip on this
experience of the self as not being a somebody? Can we assign
a positive character to this experience? The experience consists,
it seems to me, in recognizing that the definite characteristics
that constitute the self in so far as I grasp it as a particular individual,
a somebody, have a contingent character — but contingent in

[86]

relation to what? Can I really truthfully say that, at the same time
as I grasp myself as a somebody, I also grasp myself as universal
mind? In spite of some testimonies, like those of Amiel in his
Journal, it would, I think, be rash to claim this. This mysterious
reality in relation to which I see the definite characteristics of my
particular individuality as contingent is not really an object for
me — or if it is an object, it is one completely hidden by a veil,
which seems self-contradictory, for it is part of the notion of an
object that it is at least partly unveiled. I shall feel tempted to say,
therefore, that it is in relation to myself as subject that these defi
nite characteristics of my particular individuality are felt to be, and
acknowledged to be, contingent. But will the introduction of the
term 'subject' get us out of the wood here? In what sense can I
grasp myself as a subject without, to the very degree that I do grasp
myself, turning myself into an object? But we should not allow
ourselves to be halted here by difficulties which arise, in the last
analysis, from an attempt to interpret philosophical thought as
springing from the grammatical structure of language ; the
accusative case being linked, in that structure, to the object,
and to the process of objectivization. One, in fact, of the most
serious weaknesses of philosophy up to our own times seems to me
to have consisted in an outrageous over-simplification (I have
already made such a point and we shall have to go into the whole
topic much more closely) of the relationships that bind me to
myself, a failure to see that an indefinite, perhaps an infinite,
number of such relationships can be specified ; for I can behave
to myself as a master, as a friend, as an antagonist, and so on ...
I can treat myself as a stranger and, on the other hand, as some
body with whom I am intimate. But to treat myself as somebody
with whom I am intimate is to be in touch with myself as a
subject. That feeling, which has always been so strong, not only
among Christian mystics, but in, for instance, a Stoic like Marcus
Aurelius, of a certain sacred reality in the self cannot be separated
from an apprehension of the self in its subjectivity.

Nevertheless, if we push our analysis a little further, we
cannot fail to strike upon a disconcerting fact. Of this self, felt
and recognized as not being the self of some particular individual,
can we strictly say that it exists? Of course, the answer will be

that it primarily depends upon what one means by 'exists' ;
nevertheless, I am forced to take account of very numerous cases
in which I do not hesitate to say, without running any risk of
contradiction, that somebody or something exists; the real
question is whether the current use of the verb 'to exist' (quite
apart from all the notional elaborations of the idea of existence
in recent philosophy) permits us to say that this 'veiled reality'
also exists. I have no doubt about the answer : it is in the negative.
In the usual sense of the verb 'to exist', a sense, of course, which
we shall have to define by and by, this reality, taken in isolation,
does not exist — which does not necessarily mean that it is
imaginary, for there is no a priori reason for postulating a rela
tionship between the actual and the imaginary, such that what is
not actual must be imaginary, and what is not imaginary must be
actual.

But we must now ask ourselves, still holding back from
any attempt to define the notion of existence, if there is any
touchstone of existence, or rather any existence that will itself
serve as a touchstone, that we can put a name to : to be as precise
as possible, do I know of an existence such that, if I were to deny
it, any assertion by me that anything else at all existed would
become quite inconceivable? Let us notice that we are here at
the level of phenomenology and not of ontology; in the old-
fashioned terms, of appearance and not reality, of manifestation
and not ground. The question I am asking myself is by no means
a question of the following order: whether in the hierarchy of
being there is an absolute existent — which could only, of course,
be God — such that it confers existence, that the derivative exis
tence of everything else proceeds from it. No, I am talking merely
about myself, in so far as I make a judgment that something or
other exists, and I am asking myself whether there is some central
significance of existence, or some centrally significant existence
in relation to which all these judgments are arrayed and organ
ized. If there is, I would call it an existential indubitable. Now
this centrally significant existence, my denial of which entails the
inconceivability of my asserting any other existence, is simply,
of course, myself, in so far as I feel sure that I exist. But the exact
implications of that statement must be carefully elicited; for I

[88]

risk, at this point, a head-on collision with total or modified
scepticism.

Total scepticism would consist in saying: 'I am not sure
either that something exists or what sort of a something it would
be that could exist'. But to assert, in this way, that perhaps
nothing exists implies the previous taking up of two positions ;
firstly, I lay down a criterion, no doubt a vague, inexplicit
criterion, failing to satisfy which nothing can be said to exist;
secondly, I ask myself whether anything I am directly acquainted
with satisfies that criterion, and come to the conclusion that I
am not quite sure. I will risk saying that a question framed in such
hazily defined terms lacks even metaphysical significance ; but at
the phenomenological level, at least, it is quite obviously
meaningless. From our phenomenological point of view, we
have only to consider that for us, in the everyday experience we
start from, there is that which exists and that which does not
exist, and to ask ourselves what meaning we attach to this dis
tinction; we need not ask ourselves whether this existence of
everyday experience is or is not an absolute existence, nor
whether these two terms, absolute and existent, are congruous
with each other, that is whether the notion of an absolute exis
tent conveys anything to the mind. That is a problem which we
must tackle much later, in the context of all our other problems.

Relative or modified scepticism, on the other hand, would
consist in saying: 'Possibly I myself do not really exist, I who am
asking questions about existence'. Here, I think, we do really
run our heads against the existential indubitable. But we must
remember that a certain caution is necessary even at this point.
If, in the question, 'Do / exist?' I take the T separately and treat
it as a sort of mental object that can be isolated, a sort of 'that',
and if I take the question as meaning : 'Is or is not existence some
thing that can be predicated of this "that"?' the question does
not seem to suggest any answer to itself, not even a negative
answer. But this would prove simply that the question had been
badly put, that it was, if I may say so, a vicious question. It was
vicious for two reasons: because the T cannot in any case
whatsoever be treated as a 'that', because the T is the very
negation of the 'that', of any 'that' whatsoever and also because

[89]

existence is not a predicate, as Kant seems to have established
once and for all, in the Critique of Pure Reason.

If therefore the 'I exist' can be taken as an indubitable
touchstone of existence, it is on condition that it is treated as an
indissoluble unity: the T cannot be considered apart from the
'exist'. It seems necessary, however, to probe more deeply still,
for I think a discussion about the nature of this pure immediacy
— the pure immediacy expressed by the 'I exist' — must inevit
ably intrude at this point. One might, in particular, be tempted
to say that the self's immediate certitude of its existence pertains
essentially to its sense-experience ; and some modern philosophers
might be tempted to substitute for the Cogito, ergo sum of
Descartes a Sentio, ergo sum. It would be easy, to be sure, to show
that this change is a mere change in appearance; for from the
moment that, in a mental process, there intervenes anything
resembling the process of inference (like the ergo in Sentio, ergo
sum), there we have thought; the sentio masks a cogito, or rather
it is itself a cogito in an enshrouded and indistinct state. On the
offer hand the sum itself, the affirmation, 'I exist', seems to lie
at another level; above, as it were, and on the banks of every
possible current of inference. This is what Claudel expresses
with peculiar pungency in the opening lines of his Tete cf' Or:

'Here am I,

'Weak, ignorant,

'A new man in the face of unknown things,

'And I turn my face to the year and the rainy arc, my heart is
'full of weariness,

'I lack knowledge or force for action. What shall I utter, what
'shall I undertake? How shall I use these dangling hands,
'these feet of mine that draw me on like dreams?
In such lines, we are up against existence in all its nakedness.
But I would rather evoke another image, that of the small child
who comes up to us with shining eyes, and who seems to be say
ing : 'Here I am ! What luck ! ' As I wrote a few years ago in my Diary
(1943 :) 'When I say, not that I am, but that I exist. ... I glimpse
more or less obscurely the fact that my being is not only present
to my own awareness but that it is a manifest being. It might be
better, indeed, instead of saying, "I exist", to say, "I am

manifest". The Latin prefix ex — meaning out, outwards, out from —
in ''exist" has the greatest importance. I exist — that is as much
as to say : I have something to make myself known and recognized
both by others and by myself, even if I wear borrowed plumes.'
There is, to be sure, one difficulty that seems to arise in this
connection; we may be tempted to make a distinction between
the fact of existing and that of saying, to others or to oneself, that
one does exist. But in such a context perhaps the verb 'to say' is
ambiguous. To clear away that ambiguity as far as possible, let
me say that this impossibility of doubting one's own existence of -
which we have been talking seems to be linked to a kind of
exclamatory awareness of oneself; this awareness is expressed in
the small child (and, indeed, perhaps already at the level of
consciousness of the higher animals) by cries, by leaps, and so
on, though naturally with the adult its expression is more
measured and restrained — more and more so, the more, for
the adult, that immediacy of self-awareness is crusted over by
habit and by all the superstructures of an official, compartment
alized life ; it is pretty certain, in fact, that we are all tending to -
become bureaucrats, and not only in our outward behaviour, but
in our relations with ourselves. This is as much as to say that
between ourselves and existence we are interposing thicker and
thicker screens.

But even if this is the case, we must still say, quite peremp
torily, that existence and the exclamatory awareness of existence
cannot be really separated; the dissociation of the two can be
carried out only at the cost of robbing the subject of our invest
igation of its proper nature; separated from that exclamatory
self-awareness (the child's, 'Here I am! What luck!'), existence
tends to be reduced to its own corpse; and it lies outside the
power of any philosophy whatsoever to resuscitate such a corpse.
But what we should specially notice here, and what cannot be -
too much underlined, is the massive character of this self, this
existential indubitable. If we are, as I think we are, in the pres
ence here of a key datum, or rather a datum on which everything
else hinges, we should also acknowledge from the first that this -
datum is not transparent to itself; nothing could bear a smaller
likeness to the transcendental ego, which already in a certain

[91]

sense in Kant's case, but much more noticeably among his
successors, had taken its stance, as it were, at the very heart and
centre of the philosophical arena. This non-transparency is
implied in the fact, which I mentioned earlier, that I postulate
myself as existing both for myself and for others ; and when I do
so, whatever I am asserting cannot be considered apart from the
datum which is now going to take up our attention, I mean, my
body ; my body in so far as it is my body, my body in so far as it has
the character, in itself so mysterious, which we are expressing
here by saying it is something I possess, something that belongs to
me.

Let us note at once that there could be no clearer example
than that which we are now beginning to consider of the special
part played in thought by secondary, by what I have called
recuperative, reflection. Primary reflection, on the contrary, for
its part, is forced to break the fragile link between me and my
body that is constituted here by the word 'mine'. The body that
I call my body is in fact only one body among many others. In
relation to these other bodies, it has been endowed with no
special privileges whatsoever. It is not enough to say that this is
objectively true, it is the precondition of any sort of objectivity
whatsoever, it is the foundation of all scientific knowledge (in
the case we are thinking of, of anatomy, of physiology, and all
their connected disciplines). Primary reflection is therefore
forced to take up an attitude of radical detachment, of complete
lack of interest, towards the fact that this particular body happens
to be mine; primary reflection has to recall the facts that this
body has just the same properties, that it is liable to suffer the
same disorders, that it is fated in the end to undergo the same
destruction, as any other body whatsoever. Objectively speaking,
it is non-privileged; and yet spontaneously, naively, I do have a
tendency to delude myself about it, and to attribute to it — in
relation to this malady, or that — a sort of mysterious immunity;
sad experience, however, in most cases dissipates such an illusion,
and primary reflection forces me to acknowledge that the facts
must be as I have stated them.

Let it be clearly understood that secondary reflection does
not set out flatly to give the lie to these propositions ; it manifests

[92]

itself rather by a refusal to treat primary reflection's separation
of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body, some body
or other, from the self that I am, as final. Its fulcrum, or its
springboard, is just that massive, indistinct sense of one's total
existence which a short time ago we were trying, not exactly to
define (for, as the condition which makes the defining activity
possible, it seems to be prior to all definition) but to give a name
to and evoke, to locate as an existential centre.

It is easy to see that the dualism of body and soul, as it is
postulated, for instance, in the Cartesian philosophy, springs from
primary reflection, though in one peculiarly obscure passage,
indeed, Descartes was led into talking of the union of body and
soul as a third substance; but what I propose to do here is not,
in fact, to comment on such well-known philosophical doctrines,
but to get directly to grips with that non- transparent datum,
which is constituted by my body felt as 7777 body, before_primary
reflection has performed its task of dissociating the notion of
body from the notion of what is intimately mine. But how will
secondary reflection proceed in this case? It can only, it might
seem, get to work on the processes to which primary reflection
has itself had recourse ; seeking, as it were, to restore a semblance
of unity to the elements which primary reflection has first
severed. However, even when engaged in this attempt at unifica
tion, the reflective process would in reality still remain at the
primary stage, since it would remain a prisoner in the hands
of the very oppositions which it, itself, had in the first
instance postulated, instead of calling the ultimate validity of
these oppositions into question.

Everything, however, becomes fairly clear if we set the
matter in the following perspective, keeping within the limits
of that traditional logic, the logic not of the process but of the
thing, which remains faithful to the age-old distinction between

O O

the subject and the predicate. With the categories of such a
logic in mind, we shall be led either to consider the body and
soul as two distinct things between which some determinable
relationship must exist, some relationship capable of abstract
formulation, or to think of the body as something of which the
soul as we improperly call it, is the predicate, or on the other

[93]

hand of the soul as something of which the body, as we improperly
call it, is the predicate. The arguments that tell against the two
latter interpretations have been put forward so often, and besides
are so obvious in themselves, that I do not think there would be
any point in going over them again now. Besides, they are implied
in the whole general drift of our investigation. There remains to
be considered a dualism of body and soul which can, however,
take extremely different forms ; we can have psycho-physical
parallelism, as in Spinoza, or we can have psycho-physical
interactionism. But in both cases, body and soul, at least, are
treated as things, and things, for the purposes of logical discourse,
become terms, which one imagines as strictly denned, and as
linked to each other by some determinable relation. I want to
show that if we reflect on what is implied by the datum of my
body, by what I cannot help calling my body, this postulate that
body and soul are things must be rejected; and this rejection
entails consequences of the first importance.

We should notice, in the first place, that to say 'my body' is
to reject psycho-physical parallelism ; for it is to postulate a certain
intimacy of relationship between me (whatever exactly I mean by
'me' here) and my body for which the parallelist schema has no
place. I may be told that my belief in the existence of this intimacy
is a simple illusion on my part, which it is the business of the
philosopher, as such, to clear out of the way. But let us remember,
once more, that we are proceeding, throughout the whole of
this discussion, in a strictly phenomenological fashion ; that is to
say, we are accepting our everyday experience, and asking our
selves what implications we can draw from it. From this pheno
menological point of view we have to ask ourselves where the
philosopher, who is eager to clear this illusory belief out of the
way, is taking his stand. He is taking his stand on some height
where he has abstracted from his own experience, where he has
put aside, as unworthy of consideration, the fact that he himself
has this feeling of an intimate connection between himself and
his body; but it is surely permissible to think, in that case, that
for the richness of experience he is substituting mere abstract
schemas, and that, far from transcending experience, he has not
yet reached the stage of grappling with it. From my own point

[94]

of view, all I have to bear in mind is that my own experience
implies the possibility of behaving in a various number of definite
ways towards my own body; I can yield to its whims, or on the
other hand I can try to master it. It can become my tyrant, but I
can also, or so it seems, make it my slave. It is only by sheer
prodigies of acrobatic sophistry that I can fit these facts into the
framework of the parallelist thesis ; and at the point in our dis
cussion we have now reached, I can see no worthwhile reason
for trying to do so. In compensation every experience of this
kind does presuppose, as its basis, that opaque datum: my body.
What we must now see is whether an analysis of the notion of
ownership in general — of whatever the 'my' of 'my body'
implies — can set that datum in a clearer and more penetrating
light.

Is my body my body, for instance, in the same sense in which
I would say that my dog belongs to me? The question, let us first
of all notice, of how the dog originally came into my hands is
quite irrelevant here. Perhaps I found it wandering wretchedly
about the streets, perhaps I bought it in a shop; I can say it is
mine if nobody else puts in a claim for it — though this is still
quite a negative condition of ownership. For the dog to be really,
not merely nominally, mine there must exist between us a more
positive set of relations. He must live, either with me, or as I,
and I alone, have decided he shall live — lodged, perhaps, with a
servant or a farmer ; whether or not I look after him personally,
I must assume the responsibility for his being looked after. And
this implies something reciprocal in our relations. It is only if
the dog recognizes me, obeys me, expresses by his behaviour
towards me some feeling which I can interpret as affection or,
at the very least, as wholesome fear, that he is really mine; I
would become a laughing-stock if I persisted in calling an animal
that completely ignored me, that took no notice of me at all,mp
dog. And the mockery to which I would be exposed in such an
instance is very significant. It is linked to a very positive idea of
how things must be between my dog and me, before I can really
say, 'This dog is mine'.

Let us now try to see what relationship there may be between
such a mode of ownership and the link between myself and my

\95]

body that makes my body mine. We are forced to recognize that
the analogy is rather a full and exact one. There is first of all my
indisputable claim to my body, as to my dog. I recall, in this
connection, the title of a very bad novel that came out in Paris
a few years ago : My Body is My Own. This claim, this right to one's
own body, this instinctive feeling that my body belongs to me,
can be held in check only under slavery. The slave's master
thinks, on the contrary, that the slave's body belongs to him;
because he has bought that body, or for some other reason that has
to do with a particular historical situation. But it must be pointed
out that even where slavery exists as a social fact, it is always
more or less obscurely resented by the slave himself as essentially
unjust and not to be justified, as incompatible with a human
right written, as it were, into the very build of the slave's own
nature ; and I would even go as far as to say that a creature who
had lost even the very obscurest awareness of the rape committed
on him by slavery would no longer be quite human. But that is
a limit which, so long as life itself persists, can never be quite
reached; the slave really cannot rid himself of the feeling that his
body is his own.

When it comes to the question of looking after my dog, or
my body, the analogy is still relevant. Thinking of my body, I
am bound to envisage the inescapable responsibility laid upon me
to provide for its subsistence. Here, too, there is a limit, though
this time an upper limit, that implied by a total asceticism;
but here too we are leaving life, though leaving it at a more
elevated level (it is the yogi, of course, rather than the Christian
Fathers of the Desert, that I have in mind). We should notice,
also, that these two ideal limits, these two possibilities — that the
slave might say, 'This body is not mine', and the yogi, 'Looking
after this body is not my responsibility' — are in the highest degree
characteristic of our situation or our condition, call it what you
will. This is a fact we must never lose sight of.

Finally, what I have said about the dog's obedience applies
also to my union with my body ; my body is only properly mine
to the degree to which I am able to control it. But here, too, there
is a limit, an inner limit ; if as a consequence of some serious
illness, I lose all control of my body, it tends to cease to be my

[96]

body, for the very profound reason that, as we say in the common
idiom, I am 'no longer myself. But at the other extreme, pos
sibly as a yogi I also cease to be myself, and that for the opposite
reason, because the control exercised by the yogi over his body
is absolute, whereas in the mean position which is that of what we
call normal life, such control is always partial, always threatened
to some degree.

Having recognized the fulness and exactness of this analogy,
we must interpret it, but not without fkst recognizing that, in
spite of its fulness and exactness, it has its specious side; my dog, •
like, to be sure, any other object that belongs to me, presents
itself to me as something distinct from that spatio-temporal
being that I am, as external to that being. Literally speaking, it
does not form part of that being, though after a long association
between my dog and myself a special and mysterious link may be
created, something that comes very near, and in a rather precise
fashion, to wrhat we shall later call intersubjectivity.

But our central problem here has to do with the idea of
having as such. It is not, I think, very difficult to see that my link
with my body is really the model (a model not shaped, but felt)
to which I relate all kinds of ownership, for instance my owner
ship of my dog ; but it is not true that this link can itself be defined
as a sort of ownership. In other words it is by what literally must
be called a paralogism that I seek to think through my relation
ship with my body, starting off with my relationship with my
dog. The truth is rather that within every ownership, every kind
of ownership I exercise, there is this kernel that I feel to be there
at the centre ; and this kernel is nothing other than the experience
— an experience which of its very nature cannot be formulated
in intellectual terms — by which my body is mine.

We can throw at least a little light on our argument at this
point by making the following observation. The self that owns
things can never, even in thought, be reduced to a completely
dematerialized ego. It seems to me impossible even to conceive

O I

how a dematerialized ego could have any claim, or any care, to
possess anything; but the two notions of claiming and caring
are implied, of course, in every case of something's being
possessed.

H [97]

In the second place — and this observation derives from, and
may throw light on, that previously made — my possessions, in
so far as I really hold to them, or cling to them, present them
selves to me as felt additions to, or completions of, my own body.
This becomes extraordinarily clear at any moment when, for
whatever reason, the link between myself and my possessions is
snapped or even threatened. I have at such moments a sort of
rending feeling which seems quite on all fours with my feeling
when the actual wholeness of my body is threatened in some
way; and indeed such words as Vending' or 'wrenching', which
are quite commonly used to express people's feelings about losing
their possessions, are themselves very significant in this con
nection.

I shall say once more that having, possessing, owning, in the
strong and exact sense of the term, has to be thought of in analogy
with that unity, a unity sui generis, which is constituted by my
body in so far as it is my body. No doubt, as I have already said,
in the case of external having, possessing, ownership, the unity
is imperfect; the object that I possess can be lost, can be stolen,
can be damaged or decayed — while I, the dispossessed possessor,
remain. I remain, but affected by my loss, and the more affected
the more deeply, the more strongly I was, if I may coin the term,
a haver. The tragedy of all having invariably lies in our desperate
efforts to make ourselves as one with something which neverthe
less is not, and cannot, be identical with our beings; not even
with the being of him who really does possess it. This, of course,
is most strikingly so in the case where what we want to possess
is another being who, just because he or she is a being, recoils
from the idea of being possessed. That, for instance, is the point
of Moliere's VEcole des Femmes, a comedy which strikes us even
today as one of the world's imperishable masterpieces ; while the
penultimate sections of Proust's great novel, with their account
of Marcel's desperate attempts to hide Albertine away, and thus
make himself feel sure of her inside himself, provide a tragic
illustration of the same theme.

But in relation to this whole matter of possession, what is at
once characteristic and exceptional about my own body is that,
in this solitary instance, it does not seem that we can assert, in

[98]

the case of the thing possessed, the usual relationship of indepen
dence of the being who possesses. More precisely, rather, the
structure of my experience offers me no direct means of knowing -
what I shall still be, what I can still be, once the link between
myself and my body is broken by what I call death. That is a
point to which we must return, to deal with it at length, in my
second volume ; and we shall then have to ask ourselves whether
there is any way of getting out of this metaphysical blind alley.
But for the moment we must simply admit that, swathed up, as
it were, in my situation as an incarnate being, there is this riddle,
which, at a purely objective level, appears to admit of no answer
at all.

To explore this situation more thoroughly, we must tackle
it from yet another angle, and naturally it is still secondary
reflection that we are calling on to help us.

I cannot avoid being tempted to think of my body as a kind
of instrument ; or, more generally speaking, as the apparatus which
permits me to act upon, and even to intrude myself into, the
world. It does look, for instance, as if Bergson's philosophy im
plied a doctrine of the body-soul relationship of this sort ; though
this cannot be taken as a definitive interpretation of that philo
sophy. What we must do in this case, however, is just what we
did when we were examining the notion of having, owning,
possessing; we must ask ourselves what being an instrument
implies, and within what limits instrumental action is feasible.

It is obvious that every instrument is an artificial means of
extending, developing, or reinforcing a pre-existing power which
must be possessed by anyone who wants to make use of the
instrument. This, for instance, is true of the simplest tool, for
instance of the knife or the hoe. It is equally, however, true of
the most complicated optical apparatus conceivable. The basis
of such an apparatus is our power of seeing and the possibility of
extending that. Such powers are what one might call the very
notes of an organized body's activity; it might even be contended
that, considered realistically — that is to say, dynamically,
functionally — such a body consists merely of its assembled
powers. The word 'assembled', however, seems to convey in a
very inadequate fashion the kind of totality which we have here

[99]

in mind; so it might be better to say that each of the body's
powers is a specific expression of its unity — and I am thinking
of the unity of an apparatus, an apparatus adaptable to many pur
poses, and considered, by us, from the outside. Only let us
remember that it is not a body, but my body, that we are asking
ourselves questions about. As soon as we get back to this perspec
tive, our original perspective, the whole picture changes.

My body is my body just in so far as I do not consider it in
this detached fashion, do not put a gap between myself and it. To
put this point in another way, my body is mine in so far as for
me my body is not an object but, rather, I am my body. Certainly,
the meaning of 'am' in that sentence is, at a first glance, obscure ;
it is essentially, perhaps, in its implications, a negative meaning.
To say that I am my body is to negate, to deny, to erase that gap
which, on the other hand, I would be postulating as soon as I
asserted that my body was merely my instrument. And we must
notice at this point that if I do postulate such a gap, I am involved
at once in an infinite regress. The use of any instrument what-

o J

soever is, as we have seen, to extend the powers of the body, or
in a sense to extend the body itself. If, then, we think of the body
as merely an instrument, we must think of the use of the body
as being the extension of the powers of some other body (a mental
body, an astral body, or what you will) ; but this mental or
astral body must itself be the instrument that extends the powers
of some third kind of body, and so on for ever. . . . We can avoid
this infinite regress, but only on one condition: we must say
that this body, \vhich, by a fiction modelled on the instruments
that extend its powers of action, we can think of as itself an
instrument, is nevertheless, in so far as it is my body, not an
instrument at all. Speaking of my body is, in a certain sense, a way
of speaking of myself: it places me at a point where either I have
not yet reached the instrumental relationship or I have passed
beyond it.

But let us walk warily at this point. There is a way of con
ceiving the identity of myself and my body which comes down
to mere materialism, and materialism of a coarse and incoherent
sort. There would be no point in asserting my identity with the
body that other people can see and touch, and which for myself

[100]

is something other than myself, in so far as I put it on the same
level as any other body whatsoever, that is, at the level of the
body as an object. The proper position to take up seems, on the
contrary, to be this : I am my body in so far as I succeed in recog
nizing that this body of mine cannot, in the last analysis, be
brought down to the level of being this object, an object, a some
thing or other. It is at this point that we have to bring in the idea
of the body not as an object but as a subject. It is in so far as I
enter into some kind of relationship (though relationship is not
an adequate term for what I have in mind) with the body, some
kind of relationship which resists being made wholly objective
to the mind, that I can properly assert that I an\Jdentical with
my body; one should notice, also, that, like the term 'relation
ship', the term 'identity' is inadequate to our meaning here, for it
is a term fully applicable only in a world of things or more
precisely of mental abstractions from things, a world which our
incarnate condition inevitably transcends. It goes without saying,
by the way, that the term 'incarnation', of which I shall have to
make a frequent use from now on, applies solely and exclusively
in our present context to the situation of a being who appears to
himself to be linked fundamentally and not accidentally to his
or her body ... In a former work of mine, my Metaphysical
Diary, I used the phrase 'sympathetic mediation' to convey the
notion of our non-instrumental communion with our bodies ; I
cannot say that I find the phrase wholly satisfactory, but even
today, that is to say, twenty-five years later, the phrase seems to
me the least inadequate way, if only that, of conveying the slippery
notion. To elucidate the meaning of the phrase, we should recall
the fact that my body, in so far as it is properly mine, presents
itself to me in the first instance as something felt ; I am my body
only in so far as I am a being that has feelings. From this point of
view it seems, therefore, that my body is endowed with an
absolute priority in relation to everything that I can feel that is
other than my body itself; but then, strictly speaking, can I
really feel anything other than my body itself? Would not the
case of my feeling something else be merely the case of my feeling
myself as feeling something else, so that I would never be able to
pass beyond various modifications of my own self-feeling?

[10,]

But this is not the end of our difficulties : I shall be tempted
to ask myself whether I am not forced to make use of my body
in order to feel my body — the body being, at one and the same
time, what feels and what is felt. Let us notice moreover that at
this point the whole question of instrumentality intrudes itself
once more surreptitiously into our argument. My postulate has
been simply that feeling is a function which can be exercised
only thanks to some apparatus or other — the apparatus, in fact,
of my body — but by postulating this I have once more committed
myself to all the contradictions, with which we are already well
acquainted, of the instrumental view. Ought we not therefore
to conclude from this that feeling is not really a function, that
there is no instrument that enables us to feel? Was it not, really,
just this fact that feeling is not instrumentally based that my rather
obscure expression, 'sympathetic mediation', was intended to
convey ?

However that may be, we have certainly at this point laid
upon ourselves the duty of enquiring into the fundamental nature
of feeling. We shall not start by criticizing philosophical explana
tions of feelings; but by criticizing, rather, our common, every
day ways of grasping at the fact of feeling, of representing feeling
to ourselves, long before we have reached the stage of philosophical
reflection.

[,02]

CHAPTER VI

FEELING AS A MODE OF PARTICIPATION

I SHALL start off, today, by going rapidly over the stages that
have brought us up against the problem of the nature of
feeling.

In our last lecture, our point of departure was a very
general question: Who am I? We were led to ask just what con
nection my being — and by 'my being' I mean here just what I would
mean by 'my way of existence' — has with what I call my body. I
sought to prove, in regard to two typical notions (my body as a
possession of mine, and my body as an instrument of mine), that
when I seek to imagine some external relationship between me
and my body I am invariably led into a self-contradictory position,
that betrays its absurdity by implying an infinite regress. This
induced me to assert (in a negative sense, a sense whose main
purport was the denial of such external relationships) that I am my
body. We noticed, however, the ambiguity of this assertion;
it must not be interpreted, in our context, in materialist fashion.
I am my body only in so far as for me the body is an essentially
mysterious type of reality, irreducible to those determinate
formulae (no matter how interestingly complex they might be)\
to which it would be reducible if it could be considered merely]
as an object. Let us remind ourselves of exactly what the notion
of being an object implies; the body is an object in so far as it
can be scientifically known, gives scientific knowledge something
solid to get to grips with, and gives a whole range of techniques,
from hygiene to surgery, derived originally from scientific know
ledge, something equally solid to work upon. It is also obvious,
though I did not think it necessary to press home this point in our
last lecture, that my body can be an object for me; my situation as
an incarnate being implies an ability on my part to consider my body
just as if it were any other body whatosever. And it is certainly

very necessary that I should be able to consider my body in this
detached way; the necessity has a connection with what I said
in my fourth chapter about truth, about the intelligible setting
or background, against which minds are able to communicate
with each other and, I should like to add at this point, with
themselves.

So much for body as object: it seems, on the other hand,
impossible to insist on what is specifically mine in my body with
out putting one's emphasis on the notion of feeling as such.
Feeling, my feeling, is really what belongs only to me, my prerog
ative. What I feel is indissolubly linked to the fact that my body
is 1777 body, not just one body among others. I am out, let us say,
for a walk with a friend. I say I feel tired. My friend looks scept
ical, since he, for his part, feels no tiredness at all. I say to him,
perhaps a little irritably, that nobody who is not inside my skin
can know what / feel. He will be forced to agree, and yet, of
course, he can always claim that I am attaching too much import
ance to slight disagreeable sensations which he, if he felt them,
would resolutely ignore. It is all too clear that at this level no real
discussion is possible. For I can always say that even if what he
calls 'the same sensations' were felt by him and not by me, still,
they would not really be, in their new setting, in the context of
so many other sensations and feelings that I do not share, the*
same sensations; and that therefore his statement is meaningless.

But here we are up against a difficult question, a question
that one has a tendency to dodge. What, after all, is feeling, and
what makes it possible for us to feel?

We have already noticed that in trying to grasp what I mean
when I talk of my body as something felt, or of myself having the
feeling of my body, I run into difficulties. It does seem that I must
postulate the body as the necessary instrumental condition of
bodily feeling, unless, on the other hand, I am willing to admit
that feeling is something that cannot be given an instrumental
base, that it is by its nature irreducible to the functioning of an
apparatus.

We may see our way more clearly here if we change the
terms of our question and ask ourselves what makes it possible
for us, not merely vaguely to feel, but more precisely to have

[104]

sensations. How is sensation in general a possibility? (I am taking
up here an argument that I developed formerly in my first
Metaphysical Diary and rather later, merely in a more elaborate
but not in an essentially altered form, in my essay, Existence and
Objectivity.)*

In so far, then as we cling to the data of primary reflection,
we cannot help thinking of sensation as some stimulus sent from
an unknown source in outer space and intercepted by what we
call a 'subject', but a subject, in this case, thought of objectively,
that is, as a physical receiving apparatus; in other words we
think of sensation on the model of the emission and reception
of a message. It is difficult, almost impossible, for a mind at the
stage of primary reflection to deny that what is sent out at point
x (that is to say, somewhere or other), then transmitted through
space under conditions of which physics claims to give us an
intelligible picture, is finally received and transcribed by the
sensitive subject — transcribed, of course, in the key of the sense
concerned. In short, we can hardly avoid thinking of sensation as
the way in which a transmitter and a receiver communicate with
each other and in this case — as in that of telepathy, to which we
shall come back later — the imaginary model that conditions our
thinking is that of a system of radio telegraphy. Let us notice,
however, that the communication between emission post and
reception post will be conceived, and even imagined, in a quite
different manner, according to whether one does or does not

C5

adhere to a panpsychist doctrine — a doctrine that leaves, clouds,
stones, roses, too, have in a sense their souls — like, for instance,
that of Feschner. Those who reject panpsychism will not be
willing to admit that more than one of the posts (the reception
post, in fact) knows itself for what it is. The emission post, on
this theory, does not know that it is an emission post, and is only
grasped as such at the reception post. The rose and the stone are
such for us, and not for themselves. They send out no conscious
message. The panpyschists on the other hand (who are certainly
a much smaller party) believe that the emission post itself already
has a certain awareness, however tenuous or diffuse one may
suppose it to be, of the message which it is addressing to us.
^Printed as an appendix to the Journal.

The most suggestive example might be that of an odour, ascent;
between the flower-bed whose scents are now reaching me and
my own organism, something is travelling, something is being
transmitted to me, which the physicist would consider to be a
mere shaking pattern of waves ; but for the panpsychist, at the
beginning of this journey between the flower-bed and my nose,
something must already exist, a smell not yet smelt, which must,
in its essential nature, be comparable to an element of actual
awareness, comparable, perhaps, to a confused joy at mere
existence.

But what everybody admits, without asking how this is
possible, is that this shaking of the atmosphere once it reaches its
destination, my nose, is translated into the language, or trans
cribed in the key, of the sense of smell. What we must notice
very carefully is that, for an investigation of our sort, this is the
only thing that matters. The conjectures, the finally unverifiable
conjectures, on the original nature of such a thing as a smell-
on what it is, in itself, before we smell it — pass beyond the limits
of the phenomenological method. It would be only from a
strictly ontological point of view that one would be led to take
up a position for, or against, the panpsychist hypothesis. It must
therefore, fascinating as it may be in itself, no longer detain our
attention; and in any case, if there is such a thing as the presence
of the flower to the flower itself — a wavering, ghostly presence,
one imagines it ! — perhaps it would reveal itself only to the
intuition of a poet. On the other hand, for the purposes of our
own more prosaic investigation, it is of the greatest importance that
we should ask ourselves whether there is any point at all in telling
ourselves this little story about a so-called message (and the
alleged origins of the message are irrelevant) which is transcribed
in the key, or translated into the language, of the senses. Just as
in our last chapter we probed critically at the notion of the body
as an instrument, so we must now probe at the notion of sensation
as transcription or translation of a message ; and following a path
now well known to us, we shall arrive, naturally enough, at a
familiar kind of destination.

What does translation really consist of? Of the substitution
of a set of given elements for another set of given elements, at

[106]

least partly different in kind ; however many differences there may
be between the two sets, we should specially notice that both
sets must be objective, that is, fully accessible to the mind. This
is as true of the simple rendering of a piece of plain prose out
of one language into another as of the deciphering of a cryptogram.
In both cases, the translator must have access to a code, even
though in the former case the code is nothing more than an
ordinary dictionary. In the code the elements of both sides of the
transaction, equated with each other, are fully accessible to the
mind.

Now in the case of sensation, just nothing at all of this sort, -
or even remotely comparable to this, takes place. If I want to
exercise the activity of a translator, I must start with a given "
something to work on, the text I am to translate from. This is a
sort of prior datum : but the physical event prior to sensation, -
which I am supposed to be translating into the language of sensa
tion, cannot be said to be a datum of mine in any sense whatsoever.
If we do not at first acknowledge this fact, it is because we are
spellbound by physical science's picture of some distant stimulus
travelling towards the organism and shaking it up, and we confuse
that conceptual picture with the fact of having an objective datum.
What we are really doing is to project, in physical terms, the
mysterious relationship which the term datum implies. But if we
feel we must be more stringent in our reasoning than this, we are
soon caught in a dilemma : either on the one hand, we must
acknowledge that the physical event as such is not a datum of
ours, is not, whatever modifications it may exercise on our bodies
in so far as the latter too are considered in a purely objective
fashion, literally given to us in any sense at all, in which case
it seems impossible that this non-given physical event should
ever be transformed into sense data ; or on the other hand we shall -
have to bridge the gap between physical events and sense data by
postulating the existence of an intermediary order of sensibilia,
or unsensed sensa — of things that are like sensations in all respects,
except that nobody is aware of them. This way out of our diffi
culty will not stand up to critical examination. At the most, it
pushes our troubles one stage farther back. How are we to under
stand the notion of a sensation which is a sensation in all respects,

except that nobody is aware of it? If we stick to the general lines
of the interpretation we started with, we shall have to treat the
unsensed sensum as itself a message sent out from an emission
post (but missing, in this case, its destination at the reception
post), and then we are back where we started. Or, on the other
hand, we can, of course, treat the unsensed sensum, orthesensi-
bilium, as something primary and unanalysable; in that case, of
course, it cannot be a message, and so the interpretation of
sensation we started with has foundered. Moreover, if we have
technically solved our problem in this latter instance, we have
done so, quite obviously, by a piece of trickery; the sensibile
or unsensed sensum, whose existence we are assuming as our
starting point, is something about whose nature, by the very
notion of the thing, nobody can knowr anything at all.

But is there any way at all, then, out of this labyrinth?
Secondary reflection is forced to recognize that our primary
assumptions must be called in question, and that sensation, as
such, should certainly not be conceived on the analogy of the
transmission and reception of a message. For, and this is our
basic reason for rejecting the analogy, every kind of message,
however transmitted or received, presupposes the existence of
sensation — exactly in the way in which, as we have already seen,
every kind of instrument or apparatus presupposes the existence
of my body.

Let us see, now, if we can form a less strictly negative idea
of the conclusions to which our argument has led us, always bearing
in mind that what we are looking for is an answer to the question
that started us off on our enquiries into body, feeling, and sensa
tion: the question, 'Who am I?' on which, of course, there
depends the other question of what exactly I mean when I ask
who I am.

Every transmission of a message, indeed every instrumental
act of any sort at all, can be regarded as a kind of mediation. By
mediation, of course, I mean, here, in the broadest sense, any
operation at all that consists of reaching some final terminus by
making use of intermediary stages. We are talking about media
tion whenever we use such phrases as 'by means of', 'by way of,
'passing through', 'at the present stage', and so on.

[108]

From the point of view of pure thought, as Hegel saw with
incomparable strength and clarity, everything that is immediate
can be considered as mediatizable ad infinitum ; and this is true
above all of the two determinants that constitute immediate
experience as such, the 'here' and the 'now'. 'Here', when I say,
'Here I am', is a particular determinate spatial locus which, by
definition, has its place in the infinite network of determinate
spatial loci in general: 'now', similarly, when I say, 'Now I see
it', is a moment of time which is strictly bound up with all the
other moments of time. This does not, of course, imply that this
great network of loci and moments, or, as an English philosopher
like Lord Russell would say, of point-instants, forms in itself an
exhaustive whole, forms, for instance, our complete universe of
rational discourse ; that, to my mind, is a meaningless hypothesis.
No, what we have to acknowledge is merely that the privilege
which, from the point of view of my immediate experience,
attaches itself to the 'here' and to the 'now' cannot be justified
from the point of view of pure thought.

But as soon as we bring into the argument my body, in so
far as it is my body, or the feeling which is not separable from my
body as mine, our perspective changes, and we have to recog
nize the need to postulate the existence of what I will call a
non-mediatizable immediate, which is the very root of our existence.
This is a very difficult notion ; and intelligence must simply bom
bard this non-mediatizable immediate with its rays if we are to
have more than a dark and groping awareness of its whereabouts.
Yet this notion is the only means available to us of overcoming,
at least in principle, all the difficulties we have come up against
in our previous lectures.

Let us note that we are now in a better position to give a
content to what we formerly said about my certitude, 'I exist',
being a sort of touchstone, for me, of existence in general. Our
temptation, when this argument was first brought up, may have
been to consider this 'I exist' as a sort of kernel of subjective
certitude — and yet such a subjective certitude would not, after
all, would it, have taken us beyond the limits of idealism? It would
remain an open question whether a real existence did, in fact,
correspond to this subjective consciousness of existence. But

[109]

this temptation is no longer a possible temptation for us once we
have passed beyond the interpretation of sensation as the trans
mission and reception of a message. For it should be very clear
that solipsism remains at least a menace so long as we insist on
interpreting sensation as the translation or transcription of a
message sent out from an emission post whose nature, and
indeed whose very existence, had to remain in doubt. On the
ground on which we now stand the case is quite altered, and that
is what I want to make as clear as possible.

Fundamentally, we are in the situation of a man who has
just perceived that the key with which he hoped to open a cer
tain door will not, after all, fit into the lock. He must therefore
try another key, try, that is, to interpret feeling and sensation in
another language, a non-instrumentalist language. Yet let us be
wary and let us notice that the term 'interpretation' is itself a
highly ambiguous one. I am awakened, let us say, in the middle of
the night by an unaccustomed noise. My imagination, startled
into activity, suggests the most frightening hypothesis that can
be : is it not a burglar who has just broken his way into the house?
But I suddenly remember that one of my fellow lodgers warned
me he would be home very late. I feel immediately reassured, I
have interpreted, and in a sense even liquidated, the disturbing
unusual sensation. In so far as I am an active being, whose activity
must get to work on well-defined objects each with its proper
place and unmistakable label, this is the kind of interpretation
that I have need of in my everyday life. I might have had to look
for a pistol and to face the thief, or simply to phone the police ;
happily, these unpleasant possibilities remained mere possibilities ;
I need only go to sleep again.

But the kind of interpretation with which we are concerned
is essentially not only different from but, in a way, even opposed
to this practical, everyday kind of interpretation; it has to do,
for instance, in such a case as this, with the fact that I was able to
be awakened so abruptly — and all to no purpose, indeed! How
was that possible? Of course, in so far as we remain at a purely
descriptive level of discourse, a physical explanation might seem
to hold good ; I am an extremely sensitive physical apparatus and
I was shaken up by the noise of a window opening ; but on the

[1,0]

other hand, when I talk of this physical apparatus, it is not really
about myself that I am talking, and it is impossible to make it and
me completely coincide. It is for this reason that we have to
bring in the notion of what I have called elsewhere an existential
immediate, that is to say, of something I am. Perhaps we might
say, to clear up this difficulty at least negatively, that we are
dealing here with something that cannot be treated as a thought-
content ; every thought-content gives rise to mediations and is a
thought-content only through mediations. I will be coming back
to the topic later, but it may be useful here to anticipate a point
I shall make in my ninth chapter : namely, that everything becomes
much clearer if one brings in the idea of what I have called one's
exclamatory awareness of existence. For there is something in the
exclamation— in the 'CM', the 'Oh!1, the 'Ah!', the 'Ugh!',
the 'Ah, me!', the 'Alas!' — that transcends any thought-content
which can be inserted into it.

All this being so, it seems that the key for which I shall be
looking to open my door will be, in the widest sense, the idea of
participation — sharing, taking part in, partaking of. The import
ance of the idea of participation was clear to me even in the days
of my earliest philosophical gropings, before the first World
War; and the idea plays a leading part, also, in the work of a
French philosopher who is a contemporary of mine, Louis
Lavelle. All the same, at the very outset we run up against a
difficulty here, for we have got to take care that participation
itself should not — like our former inadequate analogies of the
instrument and the message — be conceived in objective terms.
Here, as elsewhere, we have to deal with a sort of graduated
scale. At one end of the scale we have what is objective, what can
be possessed. A cake is brought in, I claim my share of it; it is
only as something that is objectively in front of me, that can be
weighed and measured, that the cake can be sliced or that the
cake even exists. Let us add, that if I claim my own slice in a
peremptory fashion, it is very probably to eat it, but that it may
be not to consume it at once, but to store it away somewhere, and
it may be even to give it to someone as a present. But there are
cases in which the meaning of the verb 'to consume' is by no
means so precise. For instance, if I claim my share of a collection

of pictures, consuming my pictures, in that case, can strictly
mean looking at them. Possibly, if I have the soul of a gambler in
stocks and shares, my chief desire is to hang on to the pictures
until I can throw them into the market at some favourable
moment, when their value will have sufficiently risen; possibly,
also, it is not myself but my son who is to make this financial
kill; in such a case my share in the pictures is an ideal share, and
it is very strikingly so if, for instance, I allow the pictures to
remain provisionally in somebody else's house. However, though
we can work out all sorts of variations on this example, under
lying all of them there remains the objective character of what -
has to be shared. My participation in the ownership of the pic
tures remains, in spite of everything, my share in a share-out.
But participation need not always have this character. We have
only to think of what it means to participate, not in the ownership
of something, but in some ceremony. In general, to speak of
participating in a ceremony means that one is one of a number of
people present at it, but such participation can also have an ideal
character. I can, for instance, though tied to a sick-bed, associate
myself with this ceremony through prayer. Let us say, to make
our image more precise, that it is a ceremony of thanksgiving
to God for the end of some national calamity, an epidemic or a
war.

What, in a case of this sort, is objectively given to me? Very
little, perhaps merely an announcement in the papers or on the
radio that the ceremony in question is going to take place, and at
what time, and at which church. Yet the obstacle created by my
illness does in such a case appear to me as quite contingent and
even, in the last analysis, as non-existent. What can it matter to
God whether I am physically present or not in such and such a
church? What can the place where I happen to be matter to Him,
since it is for reasons independent of my will that I have not been
able to come to church? Naturally, of course, if I had been well
enough to come to church with a rather painful effort, and if I
had refused to make that effort, my refusal would on the contrary
have a definite significance, a negative bearing.

But we can erase from our minds, in imagining such an
example, the strictly objective element that is still represented by

the announcement of the ceremony in question in the press or on
the radio. I do not really need to know that at a given time and a
given place such and such an office of thanksgiving will be cele
brated. This thanksgiving ceremony is, after all, only a particular
expression of an act of adoration with which I can associate myself,
through prayer, at any moment. Thus we arrive at the notion of
an act of participation which no longer leaves any place for the
objectivity of a datum or even of a notification. Let us notice
also that the whole question of the number of people participat
ing has ceased to be relevant. It is not only that in this last case
I am no longer interested in knowing how many of us, at a given
moment, are participating in the act of adoration, whereas in our
former case we were concerned with a ceremony held at a
particular church at which a determinate number of persons
were present ; but it is also that in this last case I cannot be sure
that the question of how many people are joining in the act of
adoration has any meaning — it has at least, I am sure no bearing
at all. The more all of us who are praying at the same moment
are genuinely melted into a single love, the less significance,
obviously, the question of how many of us there may be really
has. Melted, I say: for nevertheless it is not as if I were alone any
more, I do really feel myself strangely strengthened by the fact
that it is a multitude who are turning at one moment towards
Him whom we adore.

I have lingered over this example because it does seem to give
us a real glimpse of what non-objective participation means. We
ought to linger, also, over this idea of non-objectivity itself;
enphasizing its value, enphasizing the fact that it is the condition\
of the reality of participation itself. All this, no doubt, will become
clearer in the sequel.

It will perhaps be observed, and justly observed, that even
this non-objective participation does presuppose an idea on which
it depends (the idea of God, in our last example) ; however indis
tinct and unspecific from the point of view of its metaphysical
attributes that idea may be. This, as I say, is true, and it is in
fact only by virtue of the idea that participation emerges; the
idea, around which non-objective participation becomes possible,
is itself the principle of the emergence of participation. But can

['"3]

we not also conceive of a kind of participation which is not
emergent but, so to say, submerged? And is it not within the power
of reflection to turn back towards that level of submerged partici
pation once it has reached the emergent level, the level illumin
ated by thought? Our point here is whether the very existence
of feeling, as such, does not bear witness to the reality of this
level of submerged participation ; it is on this question that we
must now concentrate.

Here, as elsewhere, our thought seems to come up against
the obstacle of its own tendency to represent things to itself in
physical terms, in images, metaphors, models, analogies; but
we should be proving ourselves all the more certainly the slaves
of material comparisons, if we supposed that all thought has to do is
to blast such obstacles out of its way, as one blasts a rock when
building a road. Our situation here is far more complicated.
Our picture of participation as submerged in a sort of sea and
then emerging from it into the light of thought cannot be treated
as a sort of intrusive foreign body, a mote in thought's eye;
thought has given us the image, and therefore it is only by re
shaping itself that thought can escape from the image. Secondary
reflection, as we have already said, is merely this sort of inner
reshaping, and indeed this inner reshaping is also what takes place
when we wish to attain to participation. At the outset we are
still obsessed, in spite of everything, by the visible shape that
participation takes, and we fail to realize that this shape is not
what really matters. What matters is a sort of inner bias of which
we cannot, really, make a picture. To understand this bias, it is
enough to imagine, as vividly as one can, how it is with a person ~
who desires very strongly to take part in a certain task, a self-
testing task — and who does not particularly desire to take his
share of some objectivized good which can be more or less
properly compared to a cake cut in slices. No doubt, from the
point of view of the psychologist, it is still quite possible to
depreciate and belittle this desire to take one's share in a task.
It will be said, for instance, that what I desire above all is to be
well thought of by others and that I should not be well thought of
if I sat back with my arms folded while other people were working.
But really to say this is merely to push the problem one stage

back ; we can then ask the psychologist why I bother so much
about being well thought of by others ? Only a very stupid person
would reply that I bother about it because being wrell thought of
entails material advantages, and that it is these I am really
interested in.

For it may well be that, by insisting on taking part in some
self-testing task, I expose myself not only to suffering but to
death; and this, if I am not a believer, without my being sustained
by any hope of being rewarded in heaven. Let us notice also that
there are historical situations, of which the last war was one, in
which this will to participate in some dangerous task can be
exercised against, as it were, the very grain of the individual's
given social background. Very generally indeed, we can say that
these aspects of human experience which we can least easily set
aside we can also least easily explain, unless we reserve a very
important place, and perhaps even a central place, in human
nature, for the will to participate. But — and this is what matters,
at this point in our argument — this will to participate is itself
metaphysically possible only on the basis of a kind of human
consensus (and a consensus, of course, is literally merely a
common feeling about something, and so by definition is some
thing felt, rather than something thought) ; one might add that
this consensus could only become intellectually articulate to itself
at the cost of a tremendous effort.

Where it is a matter, of course, of some large human under
taking, a war or a revolution, the statement of group feeling in
intellectual terms is possible; there are appeals, exhortations,
statements of a case. But such rationalizations of a consensus are
only a single aspect of a much vaster reality which undoubtedly
transcends the order of mere relationships between persons.
Think, for instance, of the incredibly strong link that binds the
peasant to the soil. Nothing could be wider of the facts than to
attribute to this link an exclusively utilitarian character — than to
say that the peasant is attached to the soil only because of what
he can get out of it, or because his holding assures him a certain
independence which he values, and so on. The peasant's attach
ment to the soil is something that transcends utility, that tran
scends gain. To feel the truth of this, we have only to think of

the peasant who has sold his holding and his stock and has settled
down in the city, living with his children who work there. Let
us allow, even, that his children are fond of him and show their
fondness. Materially, no doubt, this man is better off than he was
in the past ; but he does not succeed in adapting himself to his
new life, he suffers from a kind of incurable internal bleeding.
This is a favourite subject with French novelists, and has been
very well treated, for instance, by Charles Louis-Philippe in
Le Pere Perdrix.

It seems legitimate to suppose that in searching more deeply
into the nature of this link between the peasant and the soil, or
between the sailor and the sea, for that matter, we are placing
ourselves at a more favourable point of vantage for grasping what
participation means and for seeing, at the same time, in what the
specific nature of feeling consists.

In this connection, indeed, I would like to make the point
that for a philosophical approach like ours, which is essentially
a concrete rather than an abstract approach, the use of examples
is not merely an auxiliary process but, on the contrary, an essential
part of our method of progressing. An example, for us, is not
merely an illustration of an idea which was fully in being even
before it was illustrated. I would rather compare the pre-existing
idea to a seed ; I have to plant it in the genial soil that is constitu
ted by the example before I can really see what sort of a seed it
is ; I keep a watch on the soil to see what the seed grows up into.

We have thus progressed, and progressed is indeed the proper
word, towards a concept of real participation which can no longer
be translated into the language of outer objects. It is perfectly clear
that the soil to which the peasant is so passionately attached is not
something about which he can really speak. We can say that the
peasant's soil transcends everything that he sees around him,
that it is linked to his inner being, and by that we must under
stand not only to his acts but to his sufferings. The contrast
between the soil experienced in this way as a sort of inner pres
ence, and anything that a landscape may be to the amateur of
beauty who appreciates it and who selects a few epithets from his
stock to pin down its salient notes, is surely as deep and as firmly
rooted as could be. On the other hand, we could properly speak

[,,6]

of participation (though it is quite another form of participation,
of course) in such a landscape, in connection with its appreciation
by a real artist, particularly by a painter, of participation just to
the degree in which the painter is authentically creative ; and no
doubt we shall later on have an opportunity to emphasize the
intimate relationship that exists between participation and the
creative spirit.

In our remark about the presence of the soil being linked,
for the peasant, both to his acts and his sufferings, we have
already had occasion to note that effective participation tran-
scends the traditional opposition between activity and passivity;
participation can be considered now as active, now as passive,
according to the point of view at which we place ourselves. This
is probably true in all cases of participation, except for the limit
ing case where to participate means merely to receive a share, a
fragment of a certain given whole — but it is impossible, on the
other hand, to participate with all one's being in an undertaking,
a task, even in a casual adventure, without having, to some degree
at least, the feeling that one is being carried along, buoyed up
by an outer current ; and this no doubt is the indispensable con
dition without which the individual who is participating in some
enterprise would not be able to endure its fatigues — fatigues
under which he would certainly succumb if he were acting only
on his own behalf.

But these remarks have their relevance also to what has been
said above about feeling. In spite of what an empiricist material
ism has said, and has said for such a long time, feeling is not
passive. Feeling is not suffering; to feel is merely to receive, but
on the express condition that we restore to the notion of recept-
iveness a positive value of which philosophers have generally
sought to deprive it. As I have often had occasion to remark in the
past, it does seem as if Kant was guilty of a gross confusion when
he admitted, without argument, that receptiveness was a kind of
passivity. Receptiveness is not passive except in the limiting case,
to which the empiricism of the eighteenth century recurred so
eagerly, of a piece of hot wax receiving an impress from a seal.
But the general notion of receiving, when one looks at it more
closely, is very different from this. In a previous work of mine,

Du Refus a Vlnvocation, I have written 'I will postulate it as an
axiom that one cannot speak of reception (nor, in consequence, of
receptiveness) except having regard to a certain prior orientation -
of the feelings or ordering of the mind. One receives a guest in a
room, in a house, or, in the strict limiting case, in a garden; but
not in a wide undefined wasteland nor in the depths of a forest'.
In the same passage, I emphasized the metaphysical value that
attaches, or rather that should be attached, in the French language
to the preposition c/iez, our equivalent of the Latin apud : there
is no exact equivalent in English, you have to use at and the
possessive case, 'at So-and-so's'. 'There is no point in using chez •
except in relation to a self, which may, moreover, be some other
self than one's own: and by a self I mean someone about whom
we must at least suppose that he is able to say, "/Itself," to see
himself or to be seen as a self in the first person. . . . And it is
also necessary — it is even the essential point that this self should
regard a certain domain as properly his . ' I do not know whether this
point comes over very strikingly in English: but when one says
'at Smith's', for instance, that does imply that Smith is at his own
centre, and that I can be aware of him as being at his own centre, -
not at mine, and also that Smith, to be Smith adequately, does
need his own proper place that he can be at. Here, anyway, we
touch again on what I said in the last lecture about having — about
ownership or possession in the widest sense — and about its deep
roots in feeling.

In point of fact, we shall not be able to have a real concept
of participation unless we first of all emphasize everything that
chez, in such a phrase as chez soi (the equivalent of the German
Bei-sich-sein) implies; and what it implies, we should notice, is
not at this point anything at all like pour soi. (Again, it is difficult
to express this in English idiom: it is so obvious that 'at Smith's'
does not imply 'for Smith', 'for Smith alone', 'for Smith's sole
sake', or anything of that sort, that the point seems hardly worth
making.) But if to receive is, in the widest sense, to receive-'
chez soi — to receive in one's own prepared place of reception-
then to receive (and do not let us forget that feeling as a kind of
receptiveness is what we are talking about) is also in a sense to
welcome, and welcoming is not something passive, it is an act.

[118]

The term 'responsiveness' is probably our least inadequate way of
designating the activity we have in mind; we think of respon
siveness as contrasting with that inner inertia which is insensi
bility or apathy.

But can we, it will be asked, trace this elementary respon
siveness to its sources ? I think we must say categorically that such
a backward exploration is impracticable, that any attempt to
deduce the simple fact of responsiveness from more fundamental
and even simpler facts must be condemned in advance. Respon
siveness must be treated as given.

But in that case, do we not find ourselves faced with an
irreducible duality between what is non-sentient, non-responsive,
and what, on the other hand, participates, to however feeble a
degree, in that huge consensus which is, in fact, nothing other
than existence itself? It does seem, at least, that what we ought
first of all to observe as clearly as possible is the radical difference
of kind between what is non-responsive and what is responsive
to however feeble a degree, though this difference, of course, is
relevant not so much to how something really is constituted in
itself as to how it presents itself to us. Our experience does not
provide us with the evidence that would allow us to decide what
the inner nature of something that presents itself to us as non-
sentient really is. We are, in fact, in the case of non-sentient
things reduced to the categories of activity and passivity, we
can no longer, as in the case of what is sentient, transcend these;
what is non-sentient comes before us as an obstacle or, in other
cases, to be sure, as a springboard, and it might be added that
these two aspects of the non-sentient world are in the last analysis
complementary to each other. The mountain that crushes me
with the fall of its avalanche is the same mountain into the side
of which I can dig a quarry.

It might seem, perhaps, that I have only to reflect upon the
conditions under which a determinate being could intrude him
self into this non-sentient world in order to rediscover the notion
of participation as I have been striving to define it. But the diffi
culty, here again, is that we cling to the physical picture, and this
because science, by definition, cannot transcend the limits of the
physical picture. In reality, the science of embryology, pushed,

for instance, to a point of perfection which today we can hardly
imagine, would still be quite unable to throw any light at all
upon the particular problem we have been discussing. All that
embryology can do is to describe the manner in which an appar
ently elementary structure progressively becomes more com
plex. We ought not, in this connection, to underestimate the
usefulness of films which, showing, for instance, a speeded-up
version of the growth of a flower throughout a whole season,
enable us to grip together in a sort of intuitive synthesis a process
of development which has been, as it were, stretched thin across
time. But what such films can never do is to enable us to grasp
the inner drive of which the rapid efflorescence we see before
our eyes is merely the outward show.

Such films, it is worth noticing, pro vide two separate kinds
of stimulus. In the scientific technician, they awaken a desire
to reproduce in the laboratory what is happening before his eyes
on the screen, that is, to manufacture life. The artist, on the other
hand, is v^ry far from being fascinated, as the biological technician
is, by a preparatory process; he is interested in the final form
which that process subserves, in the full-blown flower. He, too,
but in a quite different way, envisages the possibility of making
that form live again, by recreating it with his brush or chisel.
But it does not look as if these two opposite kinds of stimulus can
be resolved in a higher unity ; they are like the inside and outside
of a glove; the artist's ambition is possible only at the level of
participation, while the technician's, on the other hand, in some
sense implies a refusal to participate, a blank negation. His ambi
tion consummates a purpose which, from the religious point of
view, or, more precisely, from the point of view of any vision at
all of the world as holy, must be considered sacrilegious.

The key, of course, to the scientist's purpose is the idea that
every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of conditions.
In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions,
however complex they may be, which, once they are fully recon
stituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after,
life. In other words, he seeks to start off a mechanically fated
chain-reaction; and, of course, in enumerating the conditions -
that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon

[120]

he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding,
methodical research, of himself and others. It is material condi
tions only that he is interested in. Thus, by a singular contradic
tion, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts
to persuade others, that he has arrived at the real origin of his
phenomenon; and he sets out to demonstrate that everything
in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any
creative power at any time intruding. It is against belief in such
intrusion, indeed, that the technician, strictly speaking, takes
his stand; his hybris lies precisely in an intention which is like
that of a religious propagandist, with the propaganda turned
inside out.

In the artist's case, however, there is no such intention. In
his mental world, such notions as condition, origin, original
condition, and so on, have no proper place; this is to say, if we
go into it more deeply, that for the artist, as such, the problem of
how creatures and things have gradually developed into what we
see them to be today is not a matter of any interest at all. It is in
the present form of things that he is interested. But just, strangely
enough, to the degree to which he is not interested in such fun
damental problems, he is a citizen of that kingdom of participa
tion from which one exiles oneself as soon as one seeks to redis
cover life's source or to play the drama of Genesis over again in
the laboratory.

I have emphasized, in another work,* the necessity of dis
tinguishing between man as a spectator and man as a participator,
but I must confess that this distinction has latterly, in my own
thinking, begun to lose some of its point ; at least it is clear now
to me that it is an inadequate distinction, and that the notion of
the spectator is an ambiguous notion. The spectator is present
on the scene, his dominating motive is a curiosity which has no
touch of anxiety, still less of anguish, about it, for he knows very
well that he is not himself caught up in anything that is happening
on the stage ; however bloody the conclusion of the tragedy may
be, he feels sure that he himself can leave the theatre peacefully,
catch his bus or his tube, and arrive home in time for a cup of tea,
having, on the way home, brushed away whatever emotions the
*Etre et Avoir, p. 2^.

[121]

play may have aroused in him, rather as one brushes dust off a
coat. And this, of course, is an attitude of mind which does not
belong exclusively to the spectator in the actual theatre. During
the first World War, it was still pretty much the attitude of
plenty of people in neutral countries, who watched that war, from
their safe seats, as if it had been a boxing match or a bullfight. In
distinguishing between homo spectans and homo particeps, I wanted •
to put my emphasis on the fact that in the latter case there is
self-commitment, and in the former there is not. But I was wrong _
not to have taken into account the case of contemplation, for the
contemplative is certainly somebody essentially different from
the sort of spectator to whom a war, from a safe distance, is a
stimulating spectacle, and at the point we have reached now it is
important to see where the difference between the two lies.

It seems to me now that the spectator, in the ordinary sense
of the word, makes as if to participate without really participating ;
he has emotions which are superficially similar to those of people
who really are committed to some course of action or other, but
he knows very well that in his case such emotions have no
practical outcome. In other words he is the playground for a game
of make-believe or let's-pretend, a game, however, which, as
children know, is not really enjoyable unless the beliefs and the
pretences are taken, for the time being at least, fairly seriously.
It is this game of at least half-serious voluntary self-deception that
enemies of the theatre, like Tolstoy, no doubt intended to con
demn. But mock-belief of this sort is, of course, something quite
alien to contemplation properly so called; and it is perhaps
because we have become infected by the stage and the screen
in one way, and by the attitude of the technician in a quite other
way, that contemplation today has become something so extremely
foreign to us that we find it hard to get even a glimpse of its real
nature. I would like, in passing, to add that it is impossible not
to ask oneself whether this almost complete vanishing away of
the contemplative activity in the modern world has not some
thing, at least, to do with the terrible evils from which mankind
is suffering ; and it may be that the discovery of this connection
between the presence of evil and the absence of contemplation

[,22]

will turn out to be one of the most important results of this
volume and its successor.

Without attempting, at this point, to go really deeply into
the matter, we cannot, even now, fail to see that the relation
of the contemplative activity to time — not to time in general, so
much as to duration, to the concrete time of human experience —
is something quite different from the relationship to time implied
by the attitude of the spectator. Contemplation utterly excludes
curiosity: which is to say, in other words, that contemplation
is not orientated towards the future. It is just as if for contempla
tion the temporal polarities of past and future — which are always
relative in any case, since what has been the future is always
becoming the past — had lost their meaning or, at the very least,
lost all their practical relevance. Time, for contemplation, is
nothing if it is not present time; the whole topic requires a
deeper analysis, but what we can press home, even at this point,
is that contemplation is a possibility only for somebody who has
made sure of his grip on reality; for somebody who floats on the
surface of reality, or who, as it were, skims over the thin ice of
that surface on skates, for the amateur or the dilettante, the
contemplative act is inconceivable. And we can already divine
that the ascesis, the discipline of the body, which in all ages and
for all religions has been held necessary if the soul is to be made
capable of contemplation, amounts precisely to a set of steps
which, to certain spirits, appear simply as having to be taken, if
the soul is to strengthen its grip on the real.

We may conclude from all this, and it is a very important
conclusion, that contemplation, in so far as it cannot be simply
equated with the spectator's attitude and in a deep sense is even
at the opposite pole from that attitude, must be considered as a
mode of participation, and even as one of participation's most
intimate modes. But, on the other hand, a true artist, a Vermeer,
a Corot, a Hokusai, is also a contemplative — he is anything but
a superficial spectator and nothing if not a deep participant —
only in his case contemplation embodies itself in visible works.
We shall have, perhaps, to ask ourselves later whether in the
saint's case, too, contemplation does not embody itself — but

in those invisible works, which are sanctity's very fruits!

But what at once complicates and darkens our whole quest
is that the technician, as such, cannot be lined up, either with
the spectator — that should be obvious — nor, or at least so it
seems to me, with the properly creative spirit. In other words,
does not the traditional notion of homojaber, man the craftsman,
man the tool-making animal, mask an ambiguity to which we
must discover the clue? I think we shall hit, in this connection,
on a way of handling our topic that is not without affiliations to
Bergson's distinction between intelligence and instinct. But I
shall take care, in my handling of the topic, not to extrapolate as
Bergson did, and not to deliver myself of rash speculations about
the nature of instinct in animals. It is exclusively at the level of
thought, that is to say, of human knowledge, that it seems to me
either necessary or possible to follow out this line of investigation.

124]

CHAPTER VII

BEING IN A SITUATION

TH E argument of the last lecture led us to recognize that we
can understand feeling only as a mode of participation,
but that the domain of participation, on the other hand, is much
more extensive than that of mere feeling as such. To feel is in
some degree to participate, but to participate in a higher sense
is much more than merely to feel. This point is worth emphasiz
ing, in so far as it may help us to get a clearer notion of the kind
of answer — let us be careful not to say, the kind of solution —
that will be relevant to our question: 'Who am I?' or 'What am
I?'

It will be helpful also to revert, at this point, to the notion
of contemplation as such. We shall find contemplation an intel
ligible notion if we are willing to recognize the ambiguity of the
simpler notion (which is, however, the root meaning of the word
contemplation) of looking. We can look at or for things in a way
that wholly subserves some practical activity. If I am going across
a patch of ground covered with boulders, puddles, briars, muddy
patches, and other obstacles, I keep my eyes open, I look where
I am putting my feet; my attention is continuously directed
towards a certain wholly definable kind of activity — that of
picking my way from one given point to another — and towards
the grip such an activity can get on the material datum, in this
case an imperfect thoroughfare, through which it is exercising
itself. But a less simple example, one that takes us a stage further,
is that of the botanist or geologist who makes use of a country
stroll to look for some particular plant or mineral. (To a French
ear, the English phrasal verb 'looking for' corresponds with
wonderful adequacy to the notion it expresses, the 'for' just
exactly suggesting the purposeful look of the searcher). This, as I
have said, is an intermediary example between purely practical

looking and contemplation as such; the geologist or botanist is
on the look-out for knowledge, his looking does not subserve a
practical activity in the usual sense of the term, but on the other
hand the knowledge he is seeking to extend may be of a wholly -
specialized or specializing character; it is significant, in fact,
that what he is looking for he would probably call a specimen.

But might we not say that the very essence of contemplation
as such consists, negatively at least, in the fact that it can never
be brought to bear on a specimen as such; its object, if it has an
object, is not considered as being a member of a class or as having
a place in a series; it is considered in itself, in its uniqueness,
while for the specialist — in spite of any appearance to the contrary
— that uniqueness can never be taken into account, Sie kann
nicht, as the Germans say, in Betracht kommen. All this, as I have
hinted, is assuming that contemplation has an object in the ordin
ary sense, or rather that what contemplation is brought to bear
on remains merely objective : for we may be allowed to ask
ourselves — and the question is an extremely important one —
whether, when looking becomes contemplation, it does not
switch over its direction, turn, as it were, inwards? In so far as
we are accustomed to use the word contemplation to indicate the
act by which the self concentrates its attention on its own state,
or even on its own being, might we not very properly say that
contemplation is a turning inwards of our awareness of the outer
world ?

This idea becomes clearer, it seems to me, if one remembers
that there can be no contemplation without a kind of inward
regrouping of one's resources, or a kind of ingatheredness ; to
contemplate is to ingather oneself in the presence of whatever
is being contemplated, and this in such a fashion that the reality,
confronting which one inpathers oneself, itself becomes a factor

o o

in the ingathering.

It is obvious that in the case in which the reality confronting
me is interpreted as mere spectacle, mere outer show with no
inner meaning, what I have just been saying makes no sense. If it is
possible to turn one's impression of a spectacle inwards, that is
because, after all, one is not interpreting it as mere spectacle but
as something else and something more. Let us see, however, if

[,26]

we can make this clearer. A mere spectator, confronted with
a mere spectacle, could properly be compared with a sort of
\isual recording apparatus; there would be no inwardness either
on his side or on that of what he was recording. It maybe objec
ted that the notion of a recording apparatus implies one sort of
inwardness at least — that of cogs and springs inside the outward
casing of the apparatus — but this is mere quibbling. The cogs and
springs are simply parts of a mechanical whole, and we must
assert peremptorily that to be part of such a whole is not to have
inwardness in our sense. This example, however, does serve a
purpose in showing what an equivocal notion inwardness is ;
we seek, mistakenly, for an imaginative embodiment of the
notion ; but inwardness is really one of the borderlands of the -
imagination, it lies just out of reach of imagination's evocative
power, and is, one might say, transliminal .

Let us recall, however, at this point what we said in chapter
five about instrumentality: to be instrumental is, by definition, to
be at the service of powers that are not themselves instrumental,
and which, for that very reason, can be said to be really inner
powers, really to have inwardness. We are betraying the very
nature of such powers when we seek to embody them for the pur
poses of imagination, for as soon as we do so we tend inevitably to
reduce them to mere instruments. This is why the spectator, also,
betrays his own nature when he chooses to regard himself as a

J o

mere recording apparatus ; and it is enough, indeed, for him to
reflect for a second on the emotion which a spectacle is capable of
arousing in him, for the image of himself as a mere apparatus,
with which he was satisfied enough at first, to be at once shattered.
But it is precisely to the degree in which the spectator is more „
than simply spectans, it is to the degree to which he is also
particeps, that the spectacle is more for him than a mere spectacle,
that it has some inner meaning — and it is, I repeat, to the degree
to which it is more than a mere spectacle that it can give rise to
contemplation. And our term 'participation', even though it is
so far for us not much more than a makeshift, a bridge hastily
thrown across certain gaps in our argument, indicates precisely
this 'something more' that has to be added to the simple record
ing of impressions before contemplation can arise. This whole

domain is very difficult to explore; but the way through it, I
think, is not that of coining new ad hoc terms like 'appresentation'
but rather that of meditating on the use of prepositions — such as
in, and towards, and in front of- — in common speech.

The spectacle as such, we would all agree, is in front of me,
facing me, before me; but in so far as it is something more than
a spectacle, it is not merely in front of me; shall I say that it is
in me, within me, inside me? These prepositions have a subtle
idiomatic range ; and if I say in this case that the spectacle lies
within me, or, as you would more naturally say in English, that
it is in my mind, or that it is an inner spectacle as well as an outer
one, my emphasis is largely a negative one ; it indicates that there
is some sense in which the spectacle is not external to me, or not
merely external. For in fact we are now at a stage where we have
to transcend the primary, and fundamentally spatial, opposition
between external and internal, between outside and inside. In
so far as I really contemplate the landscape a certain together
ness grows up between the landscape and me. But this is the point
where we can begin to get a better grasp of that regathering, or

o o or o o'

regrouping, process of which I spoke earlier; is this state of
ingatheredness not, in fact, the very means by which I am able
to transcend the opposition of my inner and outer worlds ? There
are profound reflections, of which we could make good use at
this point, on a relevant topic in a recent book by the Swiss
Catholic thinker, Max Picard, The World of Silence.* There is
reason to suppose that ingatheredness is the means by which I am
able to impose an inner silence on myself. Such a silence, of
course, must not be thought of as a mere absence of mental
discourse, but has its own positive value; one might call it a
fullness of being which can be reinstated only when the speech
impulse has been driven, or drawn, downwards. Human speech,
as Bergson perceived with his usual depth of vision, is naturally
adapted to the statement of spatial relationships, which are
relationships, fundamentally, of mere juxtaposition. And that
very sentence, indeed, illustrates this inadequacy of language to
the truths of the inner life. Exclusion, shutting out, is itself, of
course, fundamentally a relationship of mere juxtaposition; when
*Die Welt des Schweigens, Zurich, 1948.

[,28]

I say that true inwardness excludes such relationships, the struc
ture of language is forcing me to imply the contrary of what I
intend to assert.

Let us get back, however, to our notion of ingatheredness.
There is a preliminary observation to be made, round which any
subsequent observations will tend to group themselves. In
gatheredness is not a state of abstraction from anything, and in
fact the attitudes behind ingathering oneself, and abstracting
oneself, are diverse and perhaps at opposite poles from each
other. One abstracts one's attention from something, which is
as much as to say, leaves it, leaves it aside, perhaps even leaves
it in the lurch; ingatheredness on the other hand is essentially a
state in which one is drawing nearer something, without abandon
ing anything. All this will be clearer in a moment. One is drawing
nearer something, I have said, but nearer to what? The most
natural answer is nearer to oneself; is ingathering not merely
entering into one's own self again? But an ambiguity, noticed by
us several times already, crops up again here :what self, or rather
which self, are we here concerned with? Let us take a literary
example. In Corneille's tragedy, Cinna* the Emperor Augustus
has just discovered that a man who is his creature, on whom he
has showered favours, is heading a plot against his life. His first
reaction is anger, indignation, a wish to take vengeance on
ingratitude. But there is something within Augustus that refuses^ W
to yield utterly to these very natural impulses, and in a famous^ '
soliloquy, which is one of the high points of French classical
tragedy, Augustus forces himself to enter into his own inner
depths — into a self which is no longer that of anger and the wish
to take vengeance, nor indeed, more generally speaking, of desire
or appetite at all. This is a necessarily inadequate version of his
soliloquy, in the nearest English equivalent to the form of the
original, the heroic couplet:

'Cease to complain, but lay thy conscience bare:
'One who spared none, how now should any spare?
'What rivers of red blood have bathed thy swords —
'Now crimsoning; the Macedonian swards,

*Act IV, Scene 2.

K [I29]

'Now high in flood that Anthony should fall,

'Then high again for Sextus ! Oh, recall

'Perusia drowned with all her chivalry

'In blood — such slaughter was designed by thee,

'The bloody image of thy paths and ends !

4 Thou, turned a murderer even to thy friends,

'Was not thy very tutor stabbed by thee?

'Durst then tax Fate with an unjust decree,

'Now, if thy friends aspire to see thee bleed,

'Breaking those ties to which thou paid'st no heed?

'Just is such treason, and the Gods approve! . . .

'As easy lost as won, thy state remove,

'See traitors' swords in treacherous blood imbrued,

'And die, thou ingrate, by ingratitude!'

The case of Augustus, in Corneille's tragedy, is the case of
any one of us who does really manage to enter into his own depths.
In a dramatically personified, a wonderfully concrete shape, this
soliloquy does exemplify that inner need for transcendence to
which I devoted an earlier chapter. Only, as I have already hinted,
we must be very careful indeed at this point to avoid artificially
separating one level of the self from the other ; we must avoid
assuming that the self of reflection and ingatheredness is not the
same self as that of lust and vengeance. We are not in the physical
world, and cannot say, 'There is this self, there is that self, as we
might say, 'There is an apple, there is an orange'. I \vould prefer
to call our two selves, which are not really two selves, or our
two levels of the self — which have not, however, the sharp
measurable gap between them that the notion of a level physically
implies — different modulations of existence; let us remember
what we have already said about reflection and its power of foster
ing such modulations. But, of course, this term, modulation, or
modality, or mood — any of these words might be suitable in
English — itself needs to be made precise. We are not dealing
with what one might call predicable modulations, that is to say
of modes of being which are definitely different from each other,
but which can be predicated, at different times or in different
circumstances, of one and the same subject, or, in the vocabulary

of an older philosophy, of one and the same substance. The whole
direction of our quest will by and by give us a better understand
ing of the kind of thing we are dealing with when we talk about
these strictly existential modulations, or, if you prefer the
phrase, about these varied tones, or tonalities, of existence.

But let us resume our study of our example from Corneille's
Cinna. Augustus finds himself caught up in a certain situation; he
is the intended victim of a plot devised by conspirators of whom
two at least owe to him every thing they possess, and indeed every
thing they are, but who claim that in killing him they will be
suppressing a tyranny that has reduced Rome to servitude. It is
obvious that Augustus cannot ignore this situation; on the con
trary he must as it were revolve it in his mind, so that he can see
it from every side ; and the surprising thing is that we here once
more come up against what I said earlier about contemplation
as a turning inwards of one's awareness of the outer world. It is

O

not a matter merely of turning inwards, of introversion ; the word
that naturally occurs to us is conversion, though not in any strictly
religious sense. The Emperor appears to himself not as the mere
victim of human ingratitude, but as responsible, in the last
analysis, for the situation in which he finds himself caught up.
For in the past has he himself not acted just in the same manner as
those who have now decided on his death? So that for Augustus,
entering into his own deeper self essentially means, in this case,
seeing his situation from the other man's point of view and thus
making it impossible for himself simply to condemn the con
spirators in the straightforward fashion which at first seemed his
only course. The man who returns to his own depths is forced to
ask himself the gravest question that can be put to any man's
conscience: 'Who am I to condemn others? Do I really possess
the inner qualification that would make such a condemnation
legitimate?'

The kind of internal contradiction which we have so often
come up against here displays itself in a very striking fashion : to
enter into the depths of one's self means here fundamentally to
get out of oneself, and since there can be, as I have already several
times emphasized, no question of our having two objectively
separable selves — a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, as in Stevenson's

story — we must suppose that we are here in the presence of an
act of inner creativity or transmutation, but also that this creative
or transmuting act, through a paradox which will by and by
become less obscure, also has the character of being a return —
only a return in which what is given after the return is not iden
tical with what was given before: for such an identity — let us
suppose, for instance, that Augustus emerges from his painful
self-examination just the same man, in every respect, that he
was before it took place — would rob the ordeal of all significance
and would in fact imply that it had never really taken place. The
best analogy for this process of self-discovery which, though it is
genuinely discovery, does also genuinely create something new,
is the development of a musical composition; even if such a
composition apparently ends with the very same phrases that it
started with, they are no longer felt as being the same — they are,
as it were, coloured by all the vicissitudes they have gone through
and by which their final recapture, in their first form, has been
accompanied.

But the problem of the feasibility of bringing about a state
of ingatheredness, and, more profoundly, of the metaphysical
conditions of the ingathered state, entails, from the moment in
which we face it in its widest scope, an anxious self-questioning
about the relationship that subsists between me and my life ; or in
other words, it forces us to reflect on this notion of 'being in a
situation' which we have already considered in the case of
Corneille's Augustus.

The very fact that" the bringing about of an ingathered state
is feasible forces us to abandon an assumption which has been at
least implicit in most philosophical doctrines up to our own time :
the assumption that we can treat the given determinant condi
tions, that constitute my empirical selfhood, as contingent in
relation to a kind of abstract self, which, in the last analysis, is
identical with pure reason. If my real self were this abstract self,
obviously the ingathering process would be a process of abstrac
tion, too: it would be an operation, rather against one's natural
grain, by which one withdrew oneself from life, towards reason.
But this is just what it is not; the highest spiritual experience
bears conscious witness against any such interpretation.

To treat the self of given circumstance as contingent in
relation to a kind of transcendental kernel is fundamentally to
regard that empirical self as a husk of which the rational self can,
and in a sense ought to be, stripped. But I can only carry out this
stripping in so far as I arrogate to myself the right to abstract my
self from a given circumstance and, as it were, to stand outside it.
Let us ask ourselves whether the assumption that we can step
outside of our skins in this spry and simple fashion is not merely
an illusion or even a lie. In abstracting myself from given circum
stance, from the empirical self, from the situation in which I find
myself, I run the risk of escaping into a real never-never or no-
man's-land — into what strictly must be called a nowhere, though
it is a nowhere that I illegitimately transform into a privileged
place, a high sanctuary, a kind of Olympus of the spirit. However,
it is against the idea of such an Olympus that we are drawing up
our forces. What I said at the beginning of this book about
inclusion, in relation to the notion of an omnicomprehensive
experience, is equally true about abstraction; these are merely
mental operations that subserve certain determinate purposes,
and it is at an equally determinate stage in our journey — not
always and everywhere on our journey — that they have their
proper place. To arrive at this or that determinate result, we
properly make use of abstract thought, but there is nothing in the
method of abstraction itself that has any note of the absolute about
it. One might assert indeed, taking one's stand against that mirage
of abstract, absolute truth that has been thrown up by a certain
type of intellectualism, that from the moment when we seek to
transcend abstract thought's proper limits and to arrive at a
global abstraction, we topple over into the gulf of nonsense — of
nonsense in the strict philosophical sense, that is, of words without
assignable meaning. There is not, and there cannot be, any global
abstraction, any final high terrace to which we can climb by
means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condi
tion in this world does remain, in the last analysis, that of a
wanderer, an itinerant being, who cannot come to absolute rest
except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty of philosophic
reflection to oppose with all its strength. -

But let us notice also that our itinerant condition is in no

sense separable from the given circumstances, from which in the
case of each of us that condition borrows its special character ;
we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that
to be in a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that
cannot be dissociated from each other; are, in fact, two com
plementary aspects of our condition.

I have been pondering over our present topic for a great
many years. It was about two years before the first World War,
that is, in the days when I was starting on the investigations that
led to the writing of my first Metaphysical Diary, that I was first
led to postulate what I then called the non-contingency of the
empirically given. I was chiefly interested in raising a protesting
voice against a then fashionable type of transcendentalism, but
I was also ready to acknowledge, from that date onwards, that
the non-contingency of the empirical could be affirmed only in
a rather special sense ... as it is affirmed, in fact, by the subject
itself, in the process of creating itself qua subject. But in the
sequel, though my thought did not exactly evolve in the ordinary
current sense of that term, I found myself attaching a much more
positive and actual meaning to this notion; in the first instance,
it had been a kind of anticipatory glimpse of the shape of a thought
whose full content was still to come. The notion of an ordeal,
or test, to which the self subjects itself in the state of ingathered-
ness has played an essential part in our argument; Corneille's
Augustus underwent such a test. That notion, however, should
now enable us to grasp also in what sense a man's given circum
stances, when he becomes inwardly aware of them, can become,
in the strict sense of the term, constitutive of his new self. We
shall be tempted, of course, and we must resist the temptation,
to think of a man's given circumstances, or of the self's situation,
as having a real, embodied, independent existence outside the
self; and of course when we think of a man's situation in this
falsely objective way it does become hard to see how it could
ever become his inner ordeal. But, in fact, as Sartre, for instance,
has very lucidly demonstrated, what we call our given circum
stances come into our lives only in connection with a free activity
of ours to which they constitute either an encouragement or an
obstacle. These remarks about circumstances should be linked

[-34]

up with my earlier remarks, in chapter four, about facts. I spoke
there about the reverberatory power of facts, as I might speak
here about the reverberatory power of circumstances ; but I
insisted also that in themselves facts have no authority, and I might
even have said no autonomous validity, and I might say the same
thing now about circumstances.

There does, however, seem to be a very strict connection,
if not even a kind of identity, between what I called earlier an
inwardness and the non-contingency of given circumstances. In
fact, we might say that we can hardly talk about inwardness except
in the case w^here a given circumstance has positively fostered
inwardness, has helped on some growth of the creative spirit.
An artistic example might clarify things here. An artist like
Vermeer, we might say, did not paint his View of Delft just as he
would have painted some other view, if he had lived somewhere
else; rather, if he had lived somewhere else, though he might
still have been an artist, he would not have been Vermeer. He
was Vermeer in so far as the View of Delft was something he had
to paint; do not let us say, however, 'He was Vermeer because
he painted the View of Delft' , for the conjunction 'because', in its
causal sense, has no bearing at all on the matter. Nothing, at our
present level of discourse can allow itself to be reduced to a mere
relationship of cause and effect. If for Vermeer the view of Delft
had been a mere spectacle, if he himself could have been reduced
to the condition of a mere spectator, he would never have been
able to paint his picture; let us even assert that he would not
have been an artist at all. . . . One might be tempted at this point
to proceed to an examination of the contrast, the deep-rooted
contrast, between the artist and the photographer. But even there
we would have to be cautious. For in the last analysis the photo
grapher cannot himself be strictly compared to his own camera,
his own purely objective apparatus for recording views ; even he,
in so far as he is endowed with a certain inwardness, has in an
indefinable sense something more about him than there is about
his camera, however perfect an instrument it may be (it is not
the camera after all that chooses what angle it is set at). And in
my own case, I who am neither painter nor photographer am
still something more than a mere spectator, in so far as I am capable

of admiring the spectacle that I am contemplating. Do not let us
ever forget, indeed, that to admire is already, in a certain degree,
to create, since to admire is to be receptive in an active, alert
manner.

Experience, indeed, proves to us in the most irrefutable
fashion that beings incapable of admiration are always at bottom -
sterile beings, perhaps sterile because exhausted, because the
springs of life are dried or choked in them. But in the case in
which we do genuinely admire a landscape, or for that matter
even a human face, we cannot really feel at all that the coming
together of this landscape and this face, and of ourselves, is
merely fortuitous. In the case of genuine admiration, I am some- -
how raised above the level of mere contingency ; and yet at a
first glance I seem to be without the categories that would enable
me to designate or specify the level to which I am raised. For if
I am not at the level of mere contingency, I am certainly not at
that of mere necessity either. But in fact, from this point of
view, nothing is more important than to acknowledge — in this
following in the wake of all philosophers, Schelling for in- -
stance, who have thought deeply about art — that in this realm
the opposition between contingency and necessity must be
completely transcended.

By twisting and divergent paths, we have now perhaps
reached a point where we can arrive at a deeper understanding
of the nature of ingatheredness. In 1933, in Positions et Approches
Concretes du Aiystere Ontologique,* I expressed myself as follows:
'It is within my ingatheredness that I take my stand or, more -
accurately, equip myself to take my stand towards my own life ;
in some sense I do withdraw myself from my own life, but not as
the pure knowing subject does in idealist theories of cognition;
for in this retreat, I am still carrying with me what my life is and
also perhaps what my life is not, what it lacks. For it is at this
point that we become aware of a gap between our beings and our -
lives. I am not my life ; and if I am in a position to judge my life,
it is only on the express condition of first being able to make con
tact once more with my being, through an ingatheredness that
transcends every possible judgment on my life and every repre-
*Included in The Philosophy of Existence.

sentation of it'. I think that today I would somewhat modify
these statements. For instance it is not exactly the truth if one
says, bluntly and flatly, 'I am not my life' ; for, as one of the charac
ters in a recent play* of mine says, 'Yes and no, that is the only
possible answer where it is we ourselves who are in question'. I
ought to say both that I am my life and that I am not my life ; the
apparent contradiction tends to vanish away if we understand
that I am weighing the actual life I have been leading in the bal
ance of the potential life I carry within me, the life that I aspire
to lead, the life that I would have to lead if I wanted to become
fully myself; it is into this life of potentialty and aspiration that
I penetrate when I turn inwards. But here again, as we did a short
time ago, we have come to a place where the opposition between
contingency and necessity must be transcended. It must be
transcended as soon as anything at all resembling a personal
vocation crops up ; it is in the name of such a vocation — which
imposes itself on me not as a fate, not as the mask of dire neces
sity, but rather as an appeal to me — that I may be led to condemn
a life which is the very life which, up to the present, I have
actually been leading.

It is from a similar point of view that we must treat the
notion of an encounter, a notion whose importance has apparently
not, at least until our own time, been clearly recognized by
philosophers. As long as we keep our argument at the level of
the thing, of the physical object, the encounter or collision of
two objects can obviously be considered only as the fortuitous
intersection of two series, of which one at least must be dynamic.
A car bumps into a bus or into the side of a house. Their paths,
as we say, crossed. But at this point we may be tempted to forget
that, though there can be a collision between two objects, there
cannot be an encounter or a meeting in the fullest sense of the

o

word except between beings endowed with a certain inwardness :
and the encounter between such beings resists, of its very nature,
the attempt to express it in merely visual terms, where the col
lision of billiard or croquet balls, for instance, obviously does not.
It is also clear that, at the level of the strictly human encounter,
there is a whole scale of possible meetings that ranges from the

*L'Emissaire, in Vcrs un Autre Royaume.

['37]

quite trivial to the extremely significant. The nearer I get to the
lower end of the scale, that is to say to a basic triviality, the nearer
I get to an encounter that can be treated as an objective inter
section of paths ; humanly speaking it is nothing but a kind of
elbowing. Every day in the street or the tube I elbow my way
through hundreds of other people, and this elbowing is not
experienced in any real sense as an encounter. All these unknown
people present themselves to us, in fact, as mere bodies occupying
a certain share of space in the lebensraum in wiiich we have to
maintain our own share of space and through which we have to
thrust our way. But it is enough for some small thing to happen,
something which is objectively speaking nothing at all, for us to
transcend this subhuman level : for instance because of something
about the tone of voice in which someone in the crush says, 'I
beg your pardon', or perhaps because of something about the
smile accompanying such a simple phrase, there is a sudden spurt
of clarity, of a clarity that has nothing in common with that of the
intellect, but that can somehow light up, as a flash of lightning
would, the obscurity — which is to say, fundamentally, the soli
tude — through which we are groping our way. Let us suppose
now that two or three days later we encounter again 'by chance',
in the house of some third person, or in a hotel, the person whose
smile lighted up our way for us ; we find something very signifi
cant in this fresh meeting ; and if somebody says to us contemp
tuously that it is*a mere coincidence, we shall have a very distinct
feeling, though not one that we can justify, that the person who
expresses himself in this way has never reached the level of a
human reality that cannot be reduced to the elementary schema
of statics and dynamics that applies certainly well enough to
physical objects in whose repeated collisions, (if they were to
collide several times), there certainly could be nothing but coin
cidence. This does not mean that we are acknowledging my right
to explain this second meeting in, as it were, a mythological
fashion, but only that the meeting takes place at the level of
inwardness, that is to say, of creative development.

At this point in our argument, indeed, it should be obvious
that as soon as there is life, there is also creative development.
Or rather, to express the notion as I have expressed it already,

in a vocabulary which is also that of Karl Jaspers, there is creative
development as soon as there is being in a situation ; and, of course,
for our purposes, the term life does need to be defined in this
way, phenomenologically, and without any reference to the data
of biology. The etymological link between 'life' and 'liveliness'
in English — there is a similar link between 'vie' and 'vivacite' in
my own language — is very instructive in this connection; we
ought no doubt to be able to demonstrate that what we call
life, in a phenomenological context, is inseparable from the living
being's interest, which moreover is a contagious interest, in life.
A really alive person is not merely someone who has a taste for -
life, but somebody who spreads that taste, showering it, as it
were, around him; and a person who is really alive in this way
has, quite apart from any tangible achievements of his, something
essentially creative about him; it is from this perspective that -
we can most easily grasp the nexus which, in principle at least,
links creativity to existence; even though existence can always
decay, can become sloth, glum repetition, killing routine. It
may be that these rather simple remarks have a real relevance to .
ethics, and that they enable us to safeguard the idea of man's
personal dignity without having recourse to that ethical formalism,
which is so often sterilizing in its actual effect on conduct, and
which is too apt to disregard the element of the irreducible in
human situations and acts. It should be added that in placing
creativity at the basis of ethics, we at the same time transcend _
that sort of ethical individualism for which the individual tends v
to be thought of as something self-contained, a monad; while on
the other hand the direction of growth of our ethics would be
towards that open community of which what I have called the
ideal city is only the anticipatory skeletal form, the abstract
ground-plan.

What is more important than anything else, in fact, is to
recognize the nexus which links these different aspects of spiritual
reality. To recognize — it should be clear by now that it is around -
a series of acts of recognition that the body of thought I am striv
ing to present to you is gradually building itself up ; and perhaps
it may not be unhelpful if we reflect for a few moments on the
essential nature of recognition. There is, however, a language

problem here, but we shall have to try to get over it. The French
verb 'reconnaitre' needs, apparently, two separate English verbs
to cover the whole scope of its meaning, 'recognize' and 'ack
nowledge' : (though there are certain senses, perhaps slightly
archaic, in which 'recognize' can be used for 'acknowledge' even
in English — to recognize somebody as your King is, for instance,
the same thing as to acknowledge him as your King). Moreover,
there is a third sense of the French verb, a sense which expresses
the activity of scouts who spy out the land in front of advancing
troops, and the English do not describe this activity as recognition
but, borrowing the actual French verb in an obsolete spelling,
as reconnoitring. In what I have to say about recognition, this
range of meanings of 'reconnaitre' and 'reconnaisance' in French
must be borne in mind; it being my assumption of course that
these are not merely three disconnected meanings, which one
word through some accident of language happens to have, but
that they are intimately connected with each other, and even
really aspects of the same basic meaning. For the Englishman,
with his three different words for what are likely to seem to him
three wholly separate uses of 'reconnaitre', this assumption may
not seem so obvious as it seems to me. In our use of the word
'reconnaitre', in fact, in the present context, we are closer to
the English ranges of 'reconnoitre' than to the English ranges of
'recognize' ; lam reconnoitring, at the philosophical level, rather
as I would if I had just arrived in a strange town. I begin by feeling
quite lost there; that means that, wishing to explore the town,
I find myself back, after a few minutes, where I started; or per
haps I find myself confusing two different streets because they
look rather like each other. But my reconnoitring begins to lead
to actual recognition from the moment when I find that I am at least
sure of the route I have to follow for my immediate practical
purposes; take the first turning on the right and then, a little
farther on, turn left into a small square . . . This route that I feel
sure of becomes a sort of axis, and I make little explorations first
to one side of it, then to the other. It is clear in this example that
the set of operations by means of which I carry out my recon
naissance and gradually begin to recognize my whereabouts is
related to a certain desired line of action, an essentially mobile

[HO]

line ; the thing is to get from one particular point in the town to
another particular point; not just from anywhere to anywhere.
There are a certain number of places that interest me for one
reason or another: the post office, the town hall, the cathedral,
the theatre, and so on ... It is between these points that I must
create precise relations, all referred to my own body or to the
ancillary means which my body has at its disposal — buses, trams,
tubes, and soon — for transporting itself from one place to another.
It is interesting also to note that if there is any centre out from
which these connective lines radiate, it is the place where I am
living, a place which has a quite special relationship with my body.
But let us notice that what we have to do is to create connivances,
a network of connivances between my body and these secondary
centres of interest, each of which itself is linked with some
precise kind of activity : buying stamps, getting hold of an identity
card or a ration book, attending a religious ceremony, and so
on. . . .

Let us notice, now, that we can also reconnoitre on this
sense at the psychological or the social level. Perhaps it is a matter
of some human environment in which it is necessary that I should
learn to find my way about. Possibly somebody has warned me,
'You will meet such and such a person, he will be very nice to
you, but be cautious, he is not reliable; on the other hand, there
is another of your new associates who will seem to you at first
rather brusque in his manners, even disagreeable, rather, but
that's only on the surface, he's a very decent chap indeed,
behind his forbidding facade'. Bearing this information in mind,
I will modify my way of behaving . . . which in such a case, of
course, is above all my way of talking. Perhaps I am a naturally
trustful person, and I would be inclined to make friends at once
with the person who was very nice to me; now I know that I
ought to be a little wary of him, just as if I had been warned that
in some dark corner of my house or my hotel there was a hidden
step that one had to be careful not to stumble over.

Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. They all
converge towards a central idea, which is at once very simple
and very important, that the act of reconnoitring, of getting to
recognize my surroundings in the widest sense, is hardly separ-

[HI]

able from the sense of familiarity that is gradually created between
me and the background, whatever it may be, of my habitual
activities. We shall, of course, try to find a metaphor for this
activity of reconnoitring; in each case it is as if I had to make a
little mental sketch map, to which I could refer as I went on.
But it is important to see that what matters is not the map as
such, the map as a mental object, but the use I make of the map.
We all know people who literally do not know how to read a
map, that is to say who are unable to establish a correspondence
between the map itself and the concrete conditions under which
they are called upon to make use of it. But this correspondence —
this ability to compare the map with the countryside around one,
to get it orientated correctly, and to find one's way by it — is, of
course, what is required. And there are other cases where the
map is not properly comparable to a mental object at all, where
it consists of a set of motor impulses that fit in with each other ;
this seems to be the case with animals, w^ho, to all appearances,
are capable of reconnoitring, of finding their way about, but
who would, needless to say, not be capable of reading any kind
of map at all.

We must now continue with our process of turning our
awareness of the outer world inwards, and ask ourselves what it is
to reconnoitre, or to fail to reconnoitre, at the level of our own
lives ; what it is to find our way, or not to find our way, in our
selves. A character in one of my plays, Le Chemin de Crete,* a
woman, makes this speech to her lover: 'It is strange that you
who cannot find your way about in your own life, who are lost
there as in a dark forest, should plan the lives of others, should
cut broad roads through them, never suspecting for a moment
that your roads break down on uneven ground or get lost in
dense thickets'. It seems to me that at this point we should place
our main emphasis on the idea of a man's interests or values, an
idea which cropped up a short time ago when we spoke of life
and its centres being created in relation to extremely determin
ate modes of activity, modes of activity determined, in fact, by
such interests. To make no reconnaissance in life, and thus to fail
to recognize one's surroundings and to find one's way, is to be a
^Broadcast from London in June, 19^0, under the title Ariadne.

prey to confusion. Life in such a case is like a page of manuscript
all scribbled over with erasures and alterations. That is only a
simile, of course, but its concrete meaning is that a life, let us
say my life, has been so cluttered up with various odd jobs I have
had to do, and perhaps, too, with amusements that met only
some secondary interest of mine, that now I am no longer able to
make out what is the relative importance of any particular
occupation of mine as compared with any of my other occupa
tions. I say the relative, not the absolute, importance : I am speaking
solely of the importance of an occupation for me, not for others,
nor from some ideal standpoint — of its importance merely from
my own point of view. What is very strange indeed in this case
is that I can no longer ever get at my own point of view. Thus I
may, for instance, impose on myself a set of very wearisome
duties, without taking account of the fact that they are in some
sense fictitious duties, and that I would be far more true to myself
if I had the courage to set myself free of them. But it is not quite
clear what 'true to myself means in that sentence; we are up
against the old difficulty that crops up every time we talk of the
self. However, it should be clear enough in this instance that if
we have a distinct conception of what 'myself means in the
phrase 'true to myself, that conception is related solely to the
idea of creativity. This self to which I have to be true is perhaps
merely the cry that comes out to me from my own depths — -
the appeal to me to become that which, literally and apparently,
I now am not.

But we are now in a position to grasp the nexus that
links the act of reconnoitring, and the fact of recognition on
the one hand, with creation and creativity on the other.
To recognize one's own nature at any level \vhatsoever
is possible only for a being who is effectively acting, and
to the degree to which he is effectively acting ; though his activity
may be exercised within extremely narrow limits and not be
perceptible to the outside observer. A paralytic, for instance,
who is placed in a seat beside a high window in Montmartre, say,
or the Pincio, may still have to reconnoitre, to find his way about,
in the scene that he is contemplating. He remains an active being,
though his activity has been reduced to an exploring glance ; and

in so far as he is a reflective being his reconnoitring may lead
to a kind of self-recognition. But obviously, if he is suffering
from a total paralysis, and to the degree to which he is nothing
more than an inert object (though to be nothing more than that,
in the case of a living being, is inconceivable), this possibility
of reconnaissance and of recognition no longer exists.

All these remarks should help us to get a more exact grasp
of the meaning of the idea of a situation, an idea, indeed, of which
we have already made use in a former lecture.

It is very difficult indeed to define the notion of a situation,
in the sense of the word that interests us here, for every attempt
at a definition runs the risk of transforming the notion into that of
a set of objective relations, that is, of relations cut off from the
being that I actually am, and indeed from any other being to
whom my fancy or my feelings might lead me to compare myself.
Our best course here, therefore, is, as it has so often been in the
past, to start off from concrete examples. One can start, for in
stance, as I have done in one of my own books (Du Refus a
L' Invocation, p. 1 16), with the idea of a house or a hotel which
has 'a bad situation'. Let us take in fact, of these two alternatives,
the hotel. I say the hotel has a bad situation, and underlying
my assertion there must be a grasp, by myself, of certain object
ive relationships between the hotel and its surroundings; let us
say that the hotel is near a tannery which gives out disagreeable
smells. If the hotel has a bad situation, that is because the hotel's
very purpose is to harbour travellers, and travellers will certainly
be put out by the smell of the tannery. If somebody says to me
after a certain lapse of time, 'The hotel has been sold, people
were no longer going to it', I shall explain the hotel's failure by
its bad situation. But the notion of a situation need not necessarily
have a merely spatial application. I can say that a man is in a good
or a bad situation. Here again, underlying my assertion, there must
be certain objective data ; but these data have reference to a being
capable of saying, 'My situation', have reference, that is to say, to
the man's existence as something which he does not passively
suffer but actively lives.

It should be obvious at once that a being of this sort (a being
in a situation, a being that can say, 'My situation') is not an

[144]

autonomous whole, is not, in your expressive English phrase,
self-contained; on the contrary such a being is open and exposed,
as unlike as can be to a compact impenetrable mass. One might
even say that such a being is permeable. But here as always the
objective image must be subject to correction based on the fact
of my existence, of my awrareness of myself as existing. What we
are driving at is not a kind of porousness, like that, for instance, of
a sponge. It would be better to think of that sort of aptness to be
influenced, or that readiness to take impressions, which is called
in English 'suggestibility' or 'impressionability', a notion which
reflection finds it hard to get a grip on, partly because we have a
tendency to represent the notion to ourselves in physical terms,
and these are obviously inadequate. Suggestibility or impression
ability is usually linked to a certain lack, in the human character,
of inner cohesion. Somebody who is all of a piece with himself
cannot really be very suggestible or impressionable ; and there
fore it is the nature of this lack of inner cohesion that we ought
to try to throw more light on. We shall be inclined at first, no
doubt, to treat it as a mere lack. But that is a superficial view, and
to realize how superficial it is we have only to think of the sort
of man who is all stubbornness and resistance, the sort of man for
whom it is as impossible to be receptive to a new idea as to wel
come a new acquaintance. Is not his case the real case of inner
lack? Can we possibly consider hardness and obstinacy as posi
tively valuable qualities ? This is the moment to recall what we
previously said about receptiveness, and about how receptiveness
cannot be considered as something merely passive.

But at this point we must obviously make certain delicate
and subtle distinctions ; for if there does exist a certain relation
ship between suggestibility, impressionability, on the one hand,
and the gift of welcoming new ideas and acquaintances on the
other, nevertheless the relationship can certainly not be consid
ered as that of mere identity; for a mind can be welcoming
without being inconsistent ; but inconsistency is just what threatens
the excessively suggestible or impressionable person, the person,
that is, who lacks defences against the solicitations exercised on
him from outside by whatever it is given to him to encounter
in life. No doubt the man who is capable of welcoming some-

L [14-5]

body else's ideas does feel a momentary propensity to make them
his own, to take them under his wing; but this propensity, if it
were yielded to in every case, would obviously be a symptom of
a kind of intellectual deficiency. We ought to be capable of
understanding a new idea without therefore necessarily adopting
it ; and in reality there is no possibility of tolerance except in a
society where that distinction, between grasping a notion and
accepting it, is maintained. It must be regretfully asserted, how
ever, that this distinction, which was respected by all the best
minds of the last century, is today in danger of being altogether
obliterated from the popular consciousness; is, indeed, almost
obliterated already.

There are many reasons for this regrettable state of affairs ;
one of them no doubt is the gasping, hurrying rhythm of our lives ;
I am not referring only to the relative absence of true leisure
today, but also to the increasing incapacity even of genuinely
philosophic minds to follow out a long continuous task, the
sort of task that requires perseverance and a good wind, in
the long-distance runner's sense. Every student today is forced
to get his results as quickly as possible, no matter by how many
improper short cuts, so that he can get his degree or his doctor
ate and land his job. The results of scholarship are measured by a
•"* temporal coefficient; the point is not merely to get one's result,
but to get it in as little time as possible. Otherwise the whole
value of one's researches may be called into question, even the
possibility of earning a modest livelihood may be swept away. This
is a very serious matter, for such conditions are at the opposite
pole to those required for the real flowering of the intelligence,
in the richest sense of that word. The rather vulgar comparison
that occurs to me at the moment is that of a man who needs a
few suits in a hurry, who cannot spare time for a fitting, and who
therefore has to take one off the peg in the nearest shop. But one
cannot insist too much on the point already put so forcibly by
Bergson, that true intelligence is the enemy of the ready-made,
that, if one may put it so, all its genuine creations are made to
the customer's measure.

One might also bring in at this point a notion of cardinal
importance, though one that has been sadly neglected, the notion

[146]

that is expressed, and expressed very exactly, by the German
word distanz. I do not think that the word 'distance', either in
French or English, denotes quite the same notion, and it has
certainly not the same range of associations. We might, however,
use for distanz the English word aloofness, on condition that we
took that word as denoting a positive and valuable quality and
not, what it can also denote, a mere disinclination to participate.
What we are concerned with is a kind of borderland which
thought must keep in existence between itself and its object; or,
to express this more dynamically, we are concerned with the
act through which thought is stiffened to resist the temptation to
engulf itself in its own object and become merged with that
object. There are more and more people today who give the
impression of flinging themselves blindly into an idea or an
opinion; and a rather vulgar type of pragmatism has, of course,
played an utterly sinister part in encouraging this tendency.
Nothing could be more false, indeed, than the supposition that,
by maintaining this borderland of aloofness in existence between
thought and its object, one is tending towards a scepticism which
will by and by paralyse all one's positive thinking. On the contrary
the human mind can remain properly critical only on condition
that it preserves this aloofness, and the almost complete vanish
ing away of the critical spirit in our contemporary world is,
without any doubt at all, one of the worst of the several calamities
that today threaten the human race.

CHAPTER VIII
* MY LIFE'

IN our last chapter we wandered over a wide terrain and were
tempted into several sidepaths ; today we must get back to the
question that has been, as it were, the half-hidden theme of all
these variations, 'Who am I?', and we must tackle it directly.
Who am I, indeed — I, who interrogate myself about my own
being? I cannot do better than refer myself here to what I have
already written on this topic on one of the most important,
but also one of the most difficult pages of my book Being and
Having. But I must try as it were to de-compress what on that
page remains too compact, too little drawn out from its
implicitness.

When I ask myself, 'Who am I, I who interrogate myself
about my own being?' I have an ulterior motive, there is a more
fundamental question that I want to ask myself: it is this, 'Am I
qualified to answer this question?' Ought I not to be afraid, in
fact, just because the answer to the question, 'Who am I' ? will
finally be my own answer, that it will not be a legitimate answer?
But such a fear implies an assumption of the following sort : that
if a legitimate answer can be finally given to the question, 'Who
am 1?', it cannot be given by myself, but only by somebody else.
Let us notice that this is not just a stage, to be transcended by
and by, in the dialectical development of an abstract argument;
all of us have at times had the feeling of being lost in ourselves as
in a maze ; in such a case we do count on somebody else, the
nearest friend, the truest comrade, to help us out of the maze,
or in a word to do our reconnaissance for us and help us towards
self-recognition. 'You, who really know me better than I know
myself, tell me, is it true — am I really such a selfish, heartless
person. . . . ?' But here we are immediately up against a difficulty :
the person whom I have chosen may really be able to enlighten

me about myself, but it is I who have chosen him, it is I, that his,
who have decided that he has the qualities that are needed to give
me self-enlightenment. And once I have become aware of this,
is not my problem as acute as it ever was ? It is I myself who make
it legitimate for my friend (and yet it is on that legitimacy I am
relying) to tell me who I really am. If I chose this particular
friend, was it not because, in the depths of my being, I felt I
could risk wagering my self-esteem on his friendship for me?
Of course the opposite kind of case occurs, though more rarely;
it may be that far from turning to a tried and trusted friend I look
for someone who will torment and wound me by his pitiless
estimate of my character; one could find, in fact, quite a number
of examples, especially modern ones, of such a lust for self-
torture. But in this case as in the preceding one it is I who confer
the credentials, it is I who bestow upon my supposedly pitiless
judge, the necessary authority to pronounce against me what, let
me repeat it, I and I alone have chosen to regard as a sentence
from which there can be no appeal. But I have only to become
aware of this fact, that is, to recognize myself as the source of
my judge's authority, to be tempted to call that condemnation
into question before which, only a short time ago, I was ready to
bow my head.

Such observations may seem, to some of my hearers, a
little over-subtle. But I regard them, nevertheless, as of capital
importance, for they enable us to understand why we must
reject the idea of there actually being a legitimate answer, an
objectively valid answer, to the question: 'Who am I?' 'Who
am I?' — which is as much as to say, 'What am I worth?' — is a
riddle that, at the human level, simply cannot be solved: it is
a question that does not imply, and cannot imply, any plain
answer. It seems hardly necessary to remark that if, still uncon
vinced, we go on looking for a plain answer, we need not turn
to society, or to any particular social group, with any hope of a
successful end to our quest. But, after all, it may be worth while
insisting on the impossibility of society's giving us our answer,
especially having regard to the sort of prestige (in my humble
opinion, an entirely hollow prestige) which the notion of the
social, as such, enjoys in our own time.

[-49]

From the moment when an individual joins a political party
or a religious sect (which of the two, for our present purposes,
makes no matter), it becomes a possibility that he may yield to
this party or sect the right to regulate completely all his concerns.
But let us pause for a moment and walk warily : perhaps after all
it does make a difference whether it is a party or a sect we are
considering. Let us admit that in the case of the sect the individual
who joins it may, at least in some cases, refer himself directly to
God and not merely to the tenets and prohibitions of the sect ; and
let us consider solely the case of the political party — of the poli
tical party which, in our days, has laid hold of a tyrannic power
such as has not been even dreamt of for centuries. If I have chosen
to join a party, it seems, of course, quite logical that I should ack
nowledge its right to decide whether I am, or am not, toeing the
party line. But what is clear enough in theory runs the risk of be
coming a very complex matter in practice. If we have to do with
the rule of a dictator, if the party is merely the emanation of the
will of a leader, everything is simple enough ; in such a case the in
dividual party member alienates all his rights in favour of some
other individual, he becomes, in the strict sense of the word, a
fanatic. Notice, however, that even in this case certain factors are
bound to crop up and confuse the issue. The party leader always
represents himself as having been swept into power by some kind
of collective will of which he is the delegate, so that I can always
say that it is not for his sake, but for the sake of that collective
will, that I have deprived myself of my natural rights and civic
privileges. However, we know how fallacious the notion of such
an unconditional delegation of power is ; and the notion ought to
be dealt with, once and for all, as severely as it deserves.

Yet, on the other hand, if there is no single leader who claims
to be the delegate of the party's collective will, we are really in
the dark ; for even if a fairly solid majority is tending to take shape
within the party, it may very well be the minority, even a
minority reduced to a single individual, that has a clear view of
the situation as it is; it is very difficult, except by a sort of
arbitrary act of faith, a leap in the dark, to claim that the majority,
as such, is infallible. The possibility that the minority may be in
the right of it can only be denied in the name of what one might

jokingly call a kind of mental arithmetic — a theory that one arrives
at truth by taking a poll of opinion — which will not stand up to
even the most cursory examination. It is, we know perfectly
well, not by counting heads that we discover the wisest course.
We do, of course, tend to accept it as a rule that the decision
of a majority should prevail, but for coarse pragmatic reasons;
within the state, the rule even of a majority that makes serious
mistakes seems in most cases preferable to civil war or anarchy ;
within the party, the acceptance by minorities of certain decisions
with which they disagree seems preferable, again in most cases,
not necessarily in every case, to the gradual fragmentation of the
party by the successive splitting away of small dissident groups. It
is only by the kind of argument that runs against the grain of logic
itself that we can convert such a merely pragmatic acceptance into
a mystical assertion that majorities as such are infallible, an
assertion which experience manifestly contradicts. And there may
come a point when even the pragmatic sanctions for the accept
ance of majority decisions by the minority cease really to apply.
It would be interesting, at least, in the light of contemporary
history, to look into the methods by which, in the 'new demo
cracies', the majorities have managed to discredit and dishonour
their minorities, making them, in fact, merely qua minorities,
seem guilty of high treason. The majority, in such cases, has in
fact found a useful way of getting rid of the minority and of the
logically insurmountable difficulties which its existence within
a totalitarian party creates.

On the other hand, however, we ought to add that, except in
the case where the individual party member has become utterly and
completely fanatical, there is a risk of a tension arising in his
conscience between the party line which he ought to follow
blindly, in strict obedience to the orders of the day, and certain
values which, in spite of everything, he has not managed, at his
deepest and most sincere level of self-awareness, to dismiss as
merely negligible. Thus — and I am talking about cases with which
I have been in direct personal contact — there have been men who
have left the Communist Party just at the very moment when they
were asked to brand as a falsehood some statement which they
knew to be a true statement of fact. Quite obviously, the very

principle of totalitarianism excludes the possibility of there being
any realm in which the individual can retain the right to judge
for himself; but we should also acknowledge that the men whom
I am thinking of, and no doubt many other men of their sort,
joined the Communist Party without having come to a full and
clear awareness of the unconditional and unrestricted nature of
the commitment that was being exacted from them.

This long discussion on politics may have looked, on the
surface, like a mere digression. But it leads us to the conclusion
that I cannot delegate to the political party of which I am a
member the right to decide what I am and what I am worth,
without becoming guilty of a total alienation of my rights and
my privileges which is really equivalent to suicide. One might
say that the riddle, 'Who am /?' is in this case not solved but
merely silenced. The question, indeed, has no longer any mean
ing. It is a question that can be asked only by a person; I have
surrendered to the party everything that makes me a person, so,
in the last analysis, there is no longer anyone who can ask the
question.

At this point we once more come up against that inner need
for transcendence which we talked about in our third chapter;
but it meets us now in a much more definite shape. Let us try to
grasp how it is that, if the question, 'Who am I?' is not merely
thrust out of the way in the fashion I have just been describing, it
is transformed into an appeal sent out beyond the circle of those
associates of mine in whom, before I reached the stage of reflect
ing about it, I thought I recognized the right to judge me. Here,
with a single leap we touch the extreme edge of our leading topic
in this first volume. This appeal is supra-empirical, it is sent out
beyond the limits of experience, towards one who can only be
described as an absolute Thou, a last and supreme resource for
the troubled human spirit. This supra-empirical appeal is the
theme of what I regard as one of the most important of my
plays, V Homme de Dieu. I have been thinking over this play of mine
during the last month or two, for it has recently been put on
the stage in France, more than twenty-five years after it was
written. I shall try to describe its story in a few words, for I think
the story illustrates very clearly the difficult notion with which

we arc now grappling as the outcome of our previous reflec
tions.

The hero of this play of mine is a Huguenot pastor in a Paris
slum ; he had been called to the ministry a quarter of a century
before, in a mountain village, but in those early days of his pas
torate he had gone through a terrible moral crisis. He had doubts
about his own inner strength, and doubts, too, about whether he
was really called to the ministry ; moreover his wife had confessed
to him that she had committed adultery and that her daughter was
not his child. He was plunged into thick night ; it was as if the
ground were crumbling away under his feet. However, little by
little, gleams of light began to pierce his darkness. He felt that
he had to forgive his guilty wife and help her to regain her soul.
But at the same time the fact that he was able to forgive her
restored his confidence in himself, gave him back, at least in
some degree, his sense of being genuinely called to the ministry
by God. His reconciliation with his wife, his forgiveness of her,
has in some sense been the cornerstone of his new life. Twenty
years have passed. And suddenly the wife's old lover, with whom
she has broken off all contacts, comes back into their lives. The
lover is ill, he is in fact bound to die in the very near future;
before he dies, he wants to see the girl whom he knows to be his
daughter. The pastor does not feel that he has any right to refuse
the dying man this last and legitimate satisfaction. The pastor's
wife, on the other hand, reacts strongly against what she regards
as her husband's excessive mildness, she feels that if her husband
had a real, human love for her he could not bear to welcome into
his house the man who had betrayed him; she is thus led to
reconsider the whole past and to discount her husband's forgive
ness of her, which she now tends to regard as a professional gesture,
something that was only to be expected of a pastor; as a gesture,
moreover, from which the pastor profited as a professional man.
But she also infects her husband with her doubts ; he loses his bear
ings in his own life, he no longer knows what he thinks about his
act of forgiveness, nor, consequently, what he thinks about him
self. I will not go into the detailed working out of the plot nor
into the destruction which the pastor's inner uncertainty — to
which, however, it is not within the power of any of his fellow

humans to put an end — brings in its train. In the last analysis, the
poor pastor's only resource is to turn himself towards the One
who knows him as he is, whereas he himself perhaps is con
demned to know himself only as he is not. One might say that
during the four acts of this play of mine, we see the question,
'What am I worth?' rise up in the pastor's mind, recognize itself,
at the human level, as an insoluble riddle, and finally transform
itself into an appeal to the absolute Thou.

But I think it is necessary at this point to anticipate and to
examine certain objections — not, properly speaking, metaphysical
objections — to the general line of this argument, that may have
occurred to some of my listeners.

For instance, might not somebody bring up the following
difficulty? 'You have assumed all along', it might be said, 'that to
the question, "Who am I?" one ought to be able to reply with
an answer of the type,"^ is either A or B, but not both", that is,
' 'I am this' ' , or, "I am that' ' . But after all this is a quite gratuitous
assumption, which shows that your mind is still caught up in the
toils of a grammar-ridden scholasticism. Why not say that to the
question, "Who am I?" the answer is given by my life, my whole
life — and certainly without implying, when one says this, that the
essence of my life can be brought down to a few elementary
propositions, of the type found in handbooks of formal logic!'

This objection is a very important one, and deserves close
examination. But in order to examine it we shall have to try to
discover what exactly I mean when I talk about my life, and we
shall be obliged to admit that though the problem of my exact
meaning here cannot be evaded, it is also a problem that is very
difficult to solve in an unambiguous fashion.

My life presents itself to reflection as something whose
essential nature is that it can be related as a story ('If I told you the
story of my life, then you really would be astonished ! ') and this is
so very true that one may be permitted to wonder whether the
words 'my life' retain any precise meaning at all, if we abstract
from the meaning we attach to them any reference whatsoever
to the act of narration. What we have in mind here is not neces
sarily a story told to somebody else ; I can obviously attempt to tell
the story of my life to myself, but only on condition, of course, that

I'M]

I take up for the time being towards my life the attitude of some
other person — of some other person who is supposed not to know
about my life and to wish to know what it's been like. But to tell a
tale is, essentially, to unfold it. 'Let us start at the beginning. First
this happened to me, then that. About my earliest years, I can only
speak from hearsay, for I have no personal memories', and so on.
Thus my story will start off as the abridged version of a story that
somebody else has told me. But all this changes as soon as I begin
to get into touch with my own earliest memories . . Conceived

O J

or imagined in this way, my life presents itself to me, quite
naturally, in the shape of a sequence of episodes along the line
of time. It is obvious, on the other hand, that I shall not be setting
out to report everything that has happened to me, with all the
monotonous and wrearisome detail of every successive day, one
day on top of another. To narrate can only be to summarize
and yet the summarizing of the parts of a tale is in a certain
sense obviously an opposite kind of operation from the unfolding
of the tale as a whole. If I say, for instance, 'My earliest years were
sad years, I was so often ill', I am giving a condensed interpreta
tion of a series of events which were not given to me, when I did
experience them, in this condensed form. During these childhood
years, did I even know that I was sad and ill ? Illness is really an idea
as foreign to the small child as health is. So it is doubtful whether I
really knew that I was ill or sad. . . . Thus it is just as if, retro
spectively, I was dipping the web or tissue of my past in some
kind of dye. I only become aware of this particular hue that tinges
my childhood now, in the light of what I have learned or what I
have lived through in subsequent years. Probably therefore it is
impossible (the impossibility being implied in the very notion of
narration) for me to tell the story of my life just as I have lived it.
We have a naive idea of the story as reproducing life — we talk, for
instance, of some story as a 'slice of life' or praise its 'document
ary' exactness — but anything like a reproduction of life, in the
strict sense, is just what a story cannot provide. However con
crete my thinking may be, we have to acknowledge that my life, •
as it has really been lived, falls outside my thinking's present
grasp. The past cannot be recaptured except in fragments made
luminous by a lightning flash, a sudden glare, of memory, for

which the fragments are present rather than past; and here, of
course, we touch on the central experience around which
Proust's great novel was planned and built up. For, though we
are given certain such luminous fragments out of the past, the
mind, all the same, has to work hard to rebuild the rest of the
past around them ; and in fact this rebuilding of the past is really
a new building, a fresh construction on an old site, modelled
more or less on the former edifice there, but not identical with
it. What I mean is that it would be an illusion to claim that my life,
as I turn it into a story, corresponds at all completely with my
life as I have actually lived it. Consider what happens when we
tell our friends the very simplest story, the story, say, of some
journey we have made. The story of a journey is told by someone
who has made the journey, from beginning to end, and who
inevitably sees his earlier experiences during the journey as
coloured by his later experiences. For our final impression of what
a journey turned out to be like cannot but react on our memories
of our first impression of what the journey was going to be like.
But when we were actually making the journey, or rather begin
ning to make it, these first impressions were, on the contrary,
held quivering like a compass needle by our anxious expectations
of everything that was still to come.

From all this one might be tempted to draw a very simple
and very practical conclusion: that the only thing that can give
me an exact idea of what my life has been like will be a diary
kept regularly from day to day, like that, for instance, of Samuel
Pepys. But here we are up against new difficulties. Suppose I
had kept a diary regularly, from day to day, during the greater
part of my life. The diary will take up a certain amount of physical
space. One imagines it as a heap of fat notebooks. I will be temp
ted to say, rather naively, 'There, on that shelf, lies my life!'
But what does this really mean? Because of the desire that posses
ses us all to embody our ideas, something in us is always happy -
when we can point to an object that is localized in space and say,
' There it is!' But after all the object is only a heap of scribbled
paper; if my maid cannot read, for her it is literally nothing but
this scribbled heap, and she will be tempted to use it to start
the fire up, if we are short some day of newspapers. Suppose that

one day she is just about to commit this irreparable outrage and
that I dash up to stop her, shouting, 'Wretched creature, my
whole life is there ! ' , I will bet what you like that she makes no
sense out of what I am saying: what connection can there be, for
her, between my life and these exercise-books ?

At this point in the argument we have replaced, obviously,
the story-teller's problem by the reader's. During a period of
enforced leisure, brought about, let us say, by my retirement from
work, I decide to read over my old diary. A great many of the
entries, most of them perhaps, leave me absolutely cold, for they
tell me nothing, they awaken no living memory. I read on, just
as if I were reading about somebody else, and suddenly come upon
a detail that awakes an echo, that sets certain strings vibrating.
Here we have, at another level, the luminous fragment once more,
and how thrilling it is; and yet at the same time the entry in the
diary has for me merely the character of an allusion to something -
which, of its very nature, will not let itself be fully expressed in
words, and which is something I have lived through. This exper
ience forces me to acknowledge quite definitely that my life is
not in these notebooks. At the very most, I can think of the keeping
of my diary as a set of rather laborious experiments at which I have
plodded away in the hope of obtaining some day or other the
magical result we have just been describing. Naturally, of course,
if I am an artist in words, my experimental methods will more
frequently bear fruit. We may suppose that in such a case my
entries, when I re-read them, will arouse in me much more often
that kind of ecstasy of the vivid, particular, remembered situation
—the past situation, felt as if present — which lies at the basis
of the achievement of Proust. But on the other hand, and from
another point of view, ought not the artistic graces of my diary
to make me a little suspicious of it ? As a professional writer, am
I not likely to make the loose pattern of life conform to the
stricter pattern of my literary style — touching things up, giving
them a twist which did not really belong to them? Or look at the
matter more closely. Is something of this sort not likely to happen,
whether I am a professional writer or not? I do not record an
experience in my diary while I am having it but only some time
afterwards; and because of this interval of time, I can quite easily,

without meaning to, and without being aware of what I am doing,
give this experience a kind of shape, a completeness, say, or a
significance, which to start with it did not possess.

But there is another point we should notice. As I re-read it,
my diary, packed with disconnected detail, produces a chaotic
impression; but has my life really been this chaos? If it has, there
is nothing more to say ; life and diary are both rubbish dumps. Or at
least I am in danger of thinking so ; but at the same time I feel a kind
of inner certainty that I cannot really have lived such a shoddy,
discrepant, purposeless life. Only, does this inner certainty not
lead me to the very discouraging conclusion that my life, now
it is no longer being lived, has been changed by magic into its own
corpse — into a record which no more resembles the life I did
lead than a corpse resembles a vigorous, handsome living body?
Or, to use a different metaphor, have I really good grounds for
thinking that there remains no more of my life now than there
remains of a burnt-out firework — up like a rocket, and down like
a stick ! How can I admit that this is so ? To admit it would be to
stand out against one of the deepest of my own convictions.
Thus, surely I am under an obligation to discover what it is in
my life that subsists in spite of everything ; what it is that cannot
be carted away like rubbish, nor blown away like smoke. Is not
my life, (in so far as I can really speak about my life), what I have
tangibly achieved? Is it not, in fact, my works? To the question
put, ought I perhaps to answer: 'I am my works, I am what I
have achieved' ?

But along this road fresh difficulties and disappointments lie
in wait for us. No doubt in a certain kind of limiting case, the
case of the artist above all obviously, such an answer might seem,
at a first glance, to be quite acceptable. Is not the life of Cezanne,
or the life of Van Gogh, reducible in the last analysis to the set
of completed paintings, of sketches, of drawings, of works of art
of all sorts, which the dead great man has left behind for us? But
here we run up against the same set of snags that confronted us
just now in regard to the diary. And it would be the same if we
took the example of a novelist, Balzac or Tolstoy, or a philosopher,
Kant or Hegel. We are exposed in every case to the same tempta
tion. We see a certain number of canvasses in a gallery, a row of

volumes in a library: there, we say, is Van Gogh, there is Balzac.
But what do we really mean ? Van Gogh is only there for the man
who can see, Balzac for the man who can read. Seeing, reading:
think of the mysteries, of the unimaginable complexities, of the
operations that are denoted by these two simple terms ! We must
not be taken in by the apparently grossly material nature of the
thing that is in front of us, that we can touch and handle. The work
of art is there for us to contemplate and, in a certain sense, for us
to draw more life from ; but if we do draw more life from it, that
is only by virtue of the act by which, opening ourselves to it and
interpreting it for ourselves, we make it our own. For one's
interpretation of a work of art is related fairly strictly to the sort
of person one is, and therefore, in the case of every significant
work of art, there is a wide and varied range of possible interpre
tations. It would be quite an illusion to imagine that there is a
kind of nucleus which subsists independently of, and which is
unamenable to, all interpretation, and in which one might say
that the life and work of Van Gogh, or of Balzac, are literally
embodied. But we must carry our argument farther. The achieve
ments of a great artist may very often be uneven in quality ; some
of his works may be almost without his special personal flavour ;
glancing along the whole range, we often have to pick out the
few high peaks. But in trying to make such an objective choice we
run into serious difficulties. The works that are, for instance,
an artist's own favourites are often not those that posterity will
cling to* — but once we have mentioned posterity, we have raised
all sorts of new and formidable questions.

We talk of the judgment of posterity, but have we any
reason to suppose that this will be a consistent judgment?
Are we to think of posterity as a sort of hovering spirit,
mysteriously infallible? We shall have to ask ourselves later
whether there is any real content that we can attach to the
notion of the 'judgment of history'. But in our present much
narrower realm of discourse — we are concerned merely with
the judgments that have been made in the past and may be
made in the future about works of art — everything seems

*Gide in his last diary sees Corydon as his main achievement ; almost any critic
will consider this opinion nonsensical.

[159]

to indicate that it would be risky to the last degree to seek, in
the judgments of men at some given time, for the definitive and
the irrevocable : for our appreciations of a work of art are always,
say what we will to the contrary, affected by the 'climate of the
age', they reflect the unconscious general assumptions which we
share with our contemporaries during some given period in
history; the historically conditioned attitude is something which,
for all of us, is quite inescapable; and perhaps we cannot even
imagine, without tangling ourselves in contradictions, a dehistori-
cized attitude in the name of which completely objective judg
ments, judgments quite untainted by the local, the temporal,
the personal, and in a word quite free from relativity, could be
made about works of art, literature, and philosophy.

But what is true of the artist is necessarily even more true
of the man who leaves behind him, when he dies, no such tan
gible achievement. Might one say that such a man has at least
during his life done certain things, and that his life is really what
he has done, is his deeds or his acts? But about what deeds or
acts are we really speaking? Shall we fix our attention on a man's
habitual line of conduct or, on the other hand, on those excep
tional acts of his in which he seems to rise above or sink below
his average level? Or should we be content to recognize this
contradiction, this contrast between the average and the excep
tional, and to say that this contradiction, in the last analysis, is
the man himself? But even here we are to some degree still
thinking in metaphors ; we are imagining the contradictions in
human character as being something like the contrast of colours

o o

that clash, that, as artists say, swear at each other. But this
metaphor does not properly correspond to the reality of a human
life, even if that life is contradictory. What we really want to
know is whether a man's conscience recognizes the contradic
tions in his life, whether it accepts these contradictions or, on the
contrary, suffers because of them, whether it struggles to resolve
them, and whether or not that struggle is crowned with success.

OO

Here we are up against something which transcends the deeds
and acts in a man's life that can be objectively recorded, that can
become part of outer reality: and, for that matter, just how
literally can we take this notion of the transformation of the deed,

[i 60]

once it has been done, into a kind of thing, of the committed act
into an external fact? Let us recall what we said in an earlier
lecture about the ambiguity of the notion of a fact; the same
ambiguity is even more thickly present in the notion of an act.
Sartre, in particular, has demonstrated very clearly in his last
play, Les Mains Sales, the impossibility of my recognizing
myself in my act once it has been committed; the very
fact that the act is now over and done with, that it is irre
vocable, makes it something that I can no longer intimately
know ; can I even call up in myself the state of mind in which I
committed the act? It is infinitely probable that I cannot, for this
act (we are thinking, naturally, of the exceptional rather than the
habitual act) may have been linked to a kind of inner vertigo
which, of its very nature, cannot be deliberately reconstituted
in the mind.

But in all that we have said so far, we have been talking
about my past life, and we have come to understand that it is
pretty difficult to make it clear just what I mean by my past.
My past certainly cannot be reduced to the wearisome succession
of my days and my nights ; but on the other hand I am becoming
arbitrary, and perhaps I am merely mocking myself with empty
words, when I attempt to resolve my past into a sort of synthesis.
In the last analysis such a synthesis can only be a sort of synopsis,
a schematic summary. Its tone will depend entirely on my mood
at the moment when I undertake it. My past will take on a differ
ent colour to me according to whether I am going through a
period of discouragement or whether my work is going ahead
as vigorously and successfully as possible. So we must resolutely
set aside the idea of the past as a kind of storehouse of documents
on which various historical synopses could be based; that is a
metaphor for the custodian of old parchments. In the mysterious
essence of life there is something which just cannot be equated
with such a custodian's beloved wills, and bills, and charters; it
is, in fact, just those flashing moments in which our past relives
itself in luminous fragments that deliver us, and deliver us very
abruptly, from such metaphors for librarians.

However, our problem is really far more complex than we
have so far admitted. When I talk about my life, I am still caught

M [161]

up in my life, I am still committed to living; thus my life is not
essentially my past; to consecrate one's life or to sacrifice one's
life to a task or to a cause, that is an act whose essential nature it
is not easy for us to define, but the notion to which we relate it
seems palpably different from those which we have so far
evoked.

It is easy to show by an analysis of experience that my 'sense
of life', or my vivid awareness of being alive, is a very fluctuating
thing; the fluctuation is implied in the very fact of duration, or
of personal lived time. Let us put it in a quite general fashion and
say that the more definitely I am aiming at some purpose or other,
the more vividly I am aware of being alive ; but we must carefully
distinguish at this point between my state of anxious expectation,
when I am waiting for the arrival of important news or of some
body whom I love, and the act by which I concentrate all my
energies on the achievement of something which depends on
me, or at least in which I am in some sense really participating.
The state of anxious expectation, when we really live it through
and do not try to distract our minds from it, is experienced less
as life than as a kind of agony that eats us up: your English
word 'suspense' implies all this very expressively. But in the
other case, in which I am concentrating all my energies on some
thing, I am living in the fullest fashion, and we must look into
the nature of this fullness of life. It is worth noting here that in

o

the directly opposite case — the case of anxious expectation is
not directly opposite — in which I feel my imaginative and creative
powers flagging, in which I can do nothing, I seem to myself as
if I were a dead man ; I drag myself along, I seem to have survived
my living self. This is, in the strongest sense of the term, our
lapsed state ; we are always in danger of falling into it under the
influence of weariness or grief. Many roads can lead to it ; what
began as a creative activity can become a mere professional routine,
the interest that I take in things and events can become blunted,
and flat, and stale ; the happenings of real life may come to arouse
in me nothing more that the utter indifference with which I
watch one episode succeed another in a really bad second-feature
film. Whatever happens, it's all one to me, I couldn't, as you say,
care less. Your English word 'tediousness' — with the Latin

[162]

taedium, and we should remember, too, the phrase taedium vitae,
underlying it — conveys this feeling perfectly. But when tedium
becomes general, when it seems to spread itself over the whole
field of existence, it becomes something more than tedium, it
becomes despair.

It seems legitimate to conclude from all this that the notion
of my life cannot really be separated from that of a kind of interest
which I take in my life, but in saying this we are only pushing the
difficulty one stage further back : on what is this interest brought
to bear ? Is it brought to bear merely on the continuation of my -
own existence? Certainly this sort of curling up in one's shell
is quite a possible course of action. We all know people who do
not seem to care about anything but 'keeping fit', people whose
interest in life does not extend beyond the proper functioning
of their own bodies, but the very narrowness of their field
reflects the privation of their lives ; everything indicates that the
more a man is encumbered, is loaded down, with his own selfish
concerns, the less intensely he lives, or, if you like, the more
poverty-stricken his life is. We come up against a notion here
which seems to me of capital importance but for which it is
difficult to find an idiomatic English equivalent — at least neither
I, nor the English translator of my previous work, Being and
Having, managed to do so. The French terms I use are disponibilite
and indisponibilite. Literally, in English, one would render these as
availability and unavailability, but it might sound more natural if
one spoke of handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that
of having or not having, in a given contingency, one's resources
to hand or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is
unhandy ; I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls
made upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals
for help that may be made to him by the unfortunate. I mean rather
that, over a much wider field, he will be incapable of sympathizing
with other people, or even of imagining their situation. He re
mains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private exper
ience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is
incapable of breaking through. He is unhandy from his own point .
of view and unavailable from the point of view of others. It follows
from this that it is essential to human life not only (what is

obvious enough) to orientate itself towards something other than
itself, but also to be inwardly conjoined and adapted — rather as
the joints of the skeleton are conjoined and adapted to the other
bones — to that reality transcending the individual life which gives
the individual life its point and, in a certain sense, even its justifi
cation.

Nevertheless, and here we catch our first glimpse of the
central theme of a philosophy of inner freedom, the structure of
my life is such that it can shrivel away till it is no longer interested
in anything but itself; in other words, it does lie within my power
(and this, of course, is part of my inner freedom) blankly to reject
anything that might extend my experience. I have at this point, as
you will have noticed, substituted the term experience for the
term life, but I believe that the substitution can be justified. There
is one point of view from which life and experience can be
regarded as equivalent terms. One point of view, notice, only:
for if it is possible to give one's life, to sacrifice one's life (and
we shouldnot talk, in the same sense, of giving or sacrificing one's
experience), it is obviously only so on condition that we inter
pret the notion of one's life in a different sense, which we must
now set out to define. But in this case, as in so many others, a
preliminary analysis is necessary.

We might be tempted at first to think of life as something
which I have, as I have an account at the bank : as something which
it is for me to spend, if I feel like spending it. It is just as if I
were comparing the years that would in the ordinary course of
things be left to me to the banknotes which still remain in my
notecase and with which I can do what I like. But the comparison
is a clumsy one and can only lead us into error ; I talk about having
a certain number of years of life left to me, but of course I do
not really have them, I merely count on them. It would be much
better to compare them to a cheque about which I am in some
doubt whether it will be honoured or not; and yet I have some
grounds, at least, for supposing that it will not be dishonoured;
to sacrifice my life, therefore, would be like throwing away such
a cheque, about which I cannot be quite certain, but which is
more probably worth something than worth nothing. But, even
when corrected after such a fashion, our metaphor remains

[164]

inadequate. A cheque is something quite distinct from me, I can
get rid of it without ceasing to be myself. But is it the same with
my life? Can I give my life without giving myself? It may be
pointed out, of course, that the cheque may represent a sum of
money which I have been counting on to carry out some long-
cherished project, to make a journey perhaps which, as common
speech puts it in its vivid way, I have set my heart on. To give up
the cheque is to renounce the journey; and it is even in a sense
to maim or cripple myself, for perhaps it is the thought of this
journey that has been mainly keeping me going. I will have to find
a new reason for carrying on, a new foundation to build my life
on, and this is something difficult to do, and often very painful
to do. But surely at this point we have come back again to the
notion of sacrifice in the true sense of the word, and we have
left the realm of discourse in which we can properly talk of my
owning my life, as I own my money. The cheque, qua piece of
paper, is now nothing but a sign, a symbol. What really matters
is the act by which I set about reshaping my life.

The truth is, sacrifice — and I have in mind naturally the
most complete sacrifice, that of a man who lays down his life —
is essentially creative. So much so, in fact, that it is in danger of
falsifying its own nature if it reflects on itself in an incomplete
fashion; attempts, that is, to interpret itself in merely rational
terms. One might say that it is of the very essence of self-sacri
fice that it is not able to give a rational account of itself, or rather
that all its attempts at self- rationalization are fatally inadequate.
One does not, strictly speaking, lay down one's life for some
determinate purpose. Otherwise, we would have to conceive of
sacrifice as a mere exchange of goods — this life for this purpose —
on the open market. But at this level the notion of any such
trafficking is inconceivable. The man who gives his life, if he is
aware, in the act of giving it, of giving himself entirely — without
any hope of continuing to exist after death, for instance — cannot,
in the very nature of his case as he states it to himself, receive
anything. And this, in fact, is the point that anybody will make
who is trying to dissuade somebody, in the name of common
sense, from making such a sacrifice: why give everything for
nothing?

o

['65]

As common sense, this is irrefutable. Only, may it not be
that at this level it is common sense that is out of place ? There is
no shared ground on which common sense and the hero or martyr
could meet; they are like two axes that can never intersect. In
itself, sacrifice seems madness ; but a deeper reflection, the secon
dary and recuperative reflection of which we spoke earlier on,
enables us, as it were, to recognize and to approve it as a worthy
madness. We understand that if a man were to shirk from such
madness, he would be falling below himself. The truth seems to be
that in this special case there is no middle ground between the
subhuman and the superhuman.

But these observations can help us to throw at least some
light on the mysterious relationship between myself and my life.
I have said that giving my life seems the same as giving myself;
does this mean that I am merging myself and my life together into
a single confused concept? By no means. Let us notice that I said
giving my life seemed the same as giving myself, not as doing
away with myself. Self-sacrifice can be confused with self-slaughter
only by the man who is looking on the hero's or the martyr's
act from the outside, from its material aspect merely, and who is
therefore incapable of associating himself sympathetically with
the inner essence of the act. On the other hand, the person who is
carrying the act out has, without any doubt at all, the feeling that
through self-sacrifice he is reaching self-fulfilment ; given his own
situation and that of everything dear to him, he realizes his own
nature most completely, he most completely is, in the act of
giving his life away. But is not this a strange paradox we have run
into, and ought we not to walk delicately here? Would it not
be absurd to say that I fulfil myself by the very act with which I
do away with myself? Indeed, it would be, and very absurd
indeed. Only, this is not the formula that really applies to our
case. We have to distinguish carefully between the physical effect
of the act of self-sacrifice and the act's inner significance. The
doing away has to do only with the act's obvious physical effect:
one dead body more on a field of battle. It would be insane to say
that I fulfil myself in becoming a corpse ; my self-fulfilment takes
place at another, an invisible level. I am thinking for instance of
such a case as that of a French soldier who may have sacrificed

[1 66]

his life in the dark days of May and June, 1940, without having
any hope that his sacrifice would make the least difference to the
outcome of the Battle of France. However hard it may be to ex
press this without falling into the kind of rhetoric which every
philosopher worthy of the name ought to detest, we do feel
confident that such a man's sacrifice (and there were many such
sacrifices) did save something; what we think of it as saving is
probably honour, but, again, what we mean by honour
is not very clear. This is another opportunity for the cynical
spokesman of common sense to amuse himself by saying that all
this talk of honour is so much wind ; that I am using hollow words
that canting politicians and lying journalists use when they want
to sound noble. But would it not be truer to say that those men
who sacrificed themselves in 1940 died at peace with themselves,
and this in spite of all the horror that surrounded them ? They *
answered a kind of call that came from their very depths, and it
would certainly be arbitrary to assume that this call was articu
lately aware of itself, that it was formulated in words that could
really be adequate to its meaning. It is only from this point of
view, that is to say, in a way that we can only express in a rather
negative fashion, that it is possible to conceive how it could be
that what we call the death of these men might also have been the

^

summit, the culminating peak, of what we call their lives. But
at this point it seems as if a strange interflow is taking place be
tween these two words and as if death might be really, and in a
supreme sense, life. However, this can only be asserted on con
dition that we completely transcend the categories of biology.

Here we touch again on that extremely important truth of
which we previously became aware when we were examining the
nature of self-recognition — the truth that in the last analysis I
do not know what I live by nor why I live ; and that moreover, as
a character says in one of my plays, perhaps I can only go on living
on condition that I do not ask myself why I do. My life infinitely
transcends my possible conscious grasp of my life at any given
moment ; fundamentally and essentially it refuses to tally with
itself; as another character in my plays says, 'My life is the realm
of yes and no, the place where I have to say at the same time that
I am and that I am not\ However, what complicates and embroils

this fundamental situation, inextricable as it is even to start with,
still further, is that the practical conditions in which my life
unfolds itself force me, in spite of everything, to attempt to make
my accounts tally; but my sort of moral bookkeeping is of its
very nature concerned with factors that evade any attempt to
define their essence or even to demonstrate their existence.
Perhaps there is a certain sense in which I might describe myself
as condemned to make my calculations with cooked figures, and
there, no doubt, is the source of the stupidest blunders into which
I am led. The task of the profoundest philosophic speculation is
perhaps that of discovering the conditions (almost always dis
concerting conditions) under which the real balance-sheet may
occasionally emerge in a partial and temporary fashion from
underneath the cooked figures that mask it.

Here again I shall take an example from one of my plays,
Le Monde Casst, to which I referred also in an earlier chapter.
This is its story. Christiane Chesnay, before her marriage, loved
a young man who, just as she was going to confess her love to
him, announced that he was going to become a Benedictine monk.
From that moment, nothing seemed to matter for her; her life
had lost its meaning, and she did not feel she was doing anything
wrong in consenting to become the wife of Laurent, whom she
did not care for particularly, but who was deeply in love with
her. To distract herself, Christiane flings herself madly into a gay
and brittle social round; she has beauty and wit, she fascinates
everybody who comes near her; her husband, who is a dim, dull
sort of person, suffers from wounded vanity because nobody ever
takes any notice of him, except as his wife's husband. Christiane
discovers after a time that Laurent is meanly jealous of her social
success and that what would cheer him up would be to see her
humiliated and rejected. Through a sort of ill-directed charity
she hastens to give Laurent this satisfaction, pretending that she
is deeply in love with the musician Antonov, who ignores her.
But she feels a sort of horror when she becomes fully aware of the
effect this lie has had on her husband. Suddenly she feels herself
alone and lost and, obeying a kind of irresistible impulse, she
gives herself to a young man who is in love with her and whom
she had never taken seriously. It looks as if she is likely to elope

[168]

with her lover and thus sink for ever into the world of emptiness
and illusion. I should add that she has by this time had news of the
death of the Benedictine monk, who is the only man she ever
really loved. But just at this critical moment, the monk's sister
comes to see Christiane, and tells here a very strange story. The
young monk alone in his cell had learned in some way, perhaps
through a dream, of Christiane 's love for him. At the same time
there had been abruptly awakened in him a mysterious sense of
responsibility for her, of paternity according to the spirit. 'At
a given moment in his life', says the sister, 'he became aware that
the same act which for him was one of self-surrender to God
for you signified despair and — who knows? — ultimate perdition.
And from that moment he prayed with all possible ardour that
to you, too, it should be given to see the light'. Christiane's reac
tion to this story is a feeling of repulsion, of instinctive reaction
against this sanctified love, so different from the purely human
love she had wished for. But little by little the light breaks through
and it is the light of secondary reflection. She becomes aware at
last of the truth within her own deepest nature, the truth against
which, not wishing to recognize it, she had struggled. She
perceives that it is not her real soul that has been animating her
life, but a caricature of that soul, a false charity, all of whose
commands were lies. And in the light of this inner revelation,
even her relations with her husband are given a new foundation,
she acknowledges how guilty she has been; but there is a com
munion of sinners, as well as a communion of saints, and without
doubt it would be impossible to separate the one communion
from the other.

Obviously, this is an oddly special case. But it is more or less
true of all of us that the circumstances in which our lives unfold
themselves tend to make those lives of ours strangers to their own
underlying depths; and it is just from this point of view that we
can see how secondary reflection may exercise a recuperative
power. But it should be added that this power, though it is
intrinsic to reflection, can only be exercised in one's own case
thanks to the mediation of somebody else. This mediation, how
ever, is essentially of the spirit; it is offered or proferred to us,
but it is always up to us to acknowledge it and welcome it, and

[169]

it always remains possible for us to reject it; we shall see, by and
by, that this possibility of welcome or rejection constitutes the
very essence of our inner freedom.

170]

CHAPTER IX

TOGETHERNESS: IDENTITY AND DEPTH

DURING the last two chapters, but particularly during the
very last one, we have gradually come to acknowledge
how impossible it is not only to give, on one's own account, an
objective answer to the question, 'Who am I?' but also even to
imagine the valid giving of such an answer by anybody else who
was considering one's life from the outside. Little by little, we
have been forced to insist that my life is essentially ungraspable ; -
that it eludes me and indeed eludes, in all directions, itself.
Nevertheless, I can be called upon to sacrifice my life or, at the
very least, to consecrate it. We should pause for a moment over
this notion of consecration ; self-sacrifice can be considered, of
course, as merely the consummation of an act that consists of
living for something, of dedicating oneself to what Josiah Royce
called a cause, meaning an idea or a quest. But we should pause
here again to ask ourselves what the secret link can be that binds
my life to such an act of self-dedication. Can we consider the act
as a sort of seal set, as it were, on my life from the outside? It is
obvious that we cannot: the words 'from the outside' are grossly
inadequate, and in fact where exactly, when we talk of this act
of dedication coming from the outside, do we imagine it as coin
ing from? No, it is only from the very depths of my own life "
that this inner need for self-dedication can spring.

Moreover, we are here rediscovering, at a level of higher
potency, the truth which we acknowledged in our third chapter
when we recognized, as the phenomenology of Husserl recog
nizes, that every kind of awareness is essentially awareness of
something other than itself; so human living, driven in this way
to dedicate itself, seems also essentially the living of something
other than itself. What can make our path difficult and uncertain
at this moment is, however, that we are inclined to take it as an

[171]

axiom that awareness and life are concepts different in kind. But
the arguments of our last chapter in particular should enable us
to grasp the fact that such a difference in kind can no longer be
postulated when I am speaking, not of life as a mere phenomenon
to be investigated, but of my own life. I cannot speak of my own
life without asking myself what point it has, or even whether it
points in any direction at all. . . . The pun there, by the way, may
appear frivolous but it is necessary to convey the ambiguity of
the French word 'sens', which refers here not only to the mean
ing — in one of the multifarious senses of that slippery English
word — but also to the bearing, or direction, or relevance, or
orientation, of my life. The verb 'to mean', in English, has, of
course, these two among its many other senses: 'I don't see
what you mean' can be the equivalent of, 'I don't follow the sense
of what you are saying,' but also of, 'I follow the sense of what
you are saying, but I don't see its bearing on our general argu
ment'. 'Meaning', however, has far too many other senses, and
is too vague and confused a word altogether in its popular usage
to be suitable here. The Germans convey the two uses of 'sens'
neatly by the words 'Bedeutung' and 'Richtung' and they have an
intermediate word 'Sinn', though it does not strictly imply the
notion of orientation.

After that little linguistic digression, let us repeat the
proposition from which it arose. I cannot speak of my life without
asking myself what point it has, or even whether it points in any
direction at all ; and even if I decide that it is in fact a pointless
business, that it points nowhere, still the very fact that I have
raised the question presupposes the assumption that life, in some
cases at least, might have a point. If I could really uproot this
assumption from my mind, at the same stroke my life would cease
to be my own life. I mean that I would cease to apprehend it as
my own ; this would be that final estrangement from oneself that,
in the ideal limiting case, can be reached only by a slave, and by
a slave who has ceased to be aware of his own state of servitude.
And in fact there is every reason to suppose that except in this
abstract sense, as an ideal limiting case, such final self-estrange
ment is inconceivable. For I think that there can be no doubt that
there does remain in every slave, fairly deep down, an obscure

awareness of having been outraged, and with this awareness at
least an indistinct, incipient protest, a feeling that one's life
ought not to be a slave's life, that its proper growth has been
thwarted.

When I ask whether my life has a point, it does seem that I
am imagining a kind of significance, or relevance, which my life
would go on having whether or not I wanted it to ; I am, or so it
seems to me, more or less explicitly relating my question to the
idea of a play in which I have to take a part ; I am asking myself
about the possible theme of the performance in which I have
been induced to participate. From this point of view I might
compare my situation with that of an actor who has been given
his own cues and lines, but who has not had the play as a whole read
to him and has not even been told briefly what it is about. He has
merely been told: at such and such a cue, you will make your
entrance, you will speak the following lines, accompanying your
lines by this piece of business, then you will make your exit.
The actor has to suppose that his lines and his business, which in
themselves seem to him almost pointless have their point in rela
tion to the total pattern of the play. Thus if life as a whole has a
point — or as we would say here, not to break the metaphor, a
plot or a theme — then in some sense my own life has a plot or a
theme, too.

However, if we stick to our actual situation, it is obvious that
the life I have to live is not quite on all fours with the sort of
episode I have just been describing. Keeping to the theatrical
comparisons, which seem almost to be imposed on us at this
point, we might say that in fact I am not told in advance what my
lines and business are to be ; I have to go right out there and im
provise. But where the actor in the old comedia dell' arte had to
improvise on the rough outline of a story given to him in advance,
I am given no such rough outline. It is just as if — or so it seems

o o J

at a first glance — the producer of the play had carelessly omitted
to provide me with just the information I needed to carry out the
task that had been entrusted to me in a proper fashion. Given
all this, might I not be led into calling the very existence of the
producer into question? Or, to put the point more precisely,
would I not have solid grounds for asserting that, whether or not

[173]

there really is a producer, everything is run just as if there wasn't
one? This comes down once more to saying that there is no
rough outline, no plot, or, to go back the phrase we started with,
that my life has no point. From this. perspective, I will naturally
be led to ask whether I myself, against the grain as it were of this
general pointlessness, can by my own efforts give my life a point;
can I myself confer a kind of significance on it? This is, in its
atheistic form, the position of contemporary existentialism. Of
course, we have already seen quite a number of reasons for con
sidering it to be an untenable position.

Did I not affirm at the beginning of this lecture that it seems
impossible that the act by which I consecrate my life to some idea
or quest could be regarded as external to my life, but that, on the
contrary, the act rather resembles the bursting of my life into
flower? But according to the hypothesis of atheistic existentialism,
which I have just formulated, this act of consecration would be
something external to my life. The hypothesis implies, apparently,
something more or less of the following sort : that my life has
come into my hands by accident, through the merest unforseeable
chance, like a notecase that one happens to find dropped on the
pavement. If I am an honest person, I have no doubt tried to return
the notecase to its owner ; all my attempts to find him have proved
vain, and here I am in possession of a considerable sum of money.
What shall I do with it, to what use shall I put it? In this case, we
should notice that our question has a definite scope and implies
a range of possible definite answers ; finding this money may give
me a chance to satisfy some old wish — or to pay some old debt —
or to help somebody who is not merely in a state of poverty but
in a state of wretchedness. I must make a choice between such
concrete possibilities. But such possibilities, it should be noted,
have their roots in my own life, such as it was before I found the
notecase. My life, itself, on the other hand, cannot really be
compared to this lucky find. I do not find myself alive, in the sense
in which I might find the owner of these stray coins or notes. My
existence as a living being precedes this discovery of myself as a
living being. One might even say that, by a fatal necessity, I
pre-exist myself. But this forces us to take up a position diamet
rically opposed to that, for instance, of Sartre, in that sentence of

his that has been so often quoted: 'Man's motto is to be a maker
and, as a maker, to make himself and to be nothing but the self
he has made for himself . Everything that we have been saying up
to this very moment forces us to take our stand against any such
affirmation. 'It would be impossible,' I wrote, commenting on
this sentence in my essay, Techniques of Degradation,* 'to deny in a
more aggressive fashion the existence of any sort of natural world,
of anything that is inherited by us, or, more profoundly, of
reality itself, that reality which is conferred upon us or in which
we participate, and which gives us a greater impetus, the deeper
we penetrate into it.'

The time has come when we should attempt to draw out all
the implications of the notions of a situation, and of participation
as we have attempted to elucidate them in our three previous
chapters. It may be, however, that to reach our goal we may find
it convenient to go back, in the first instance, to the problem of
the relationships between myself and others, as that problem now
stands, in the light of our previous observations, and particularly
in the light of that criticism of the notion of a state of consciousness
which I roughed out in chapter three. I think my best course will
be to present you with a condensed version of my analysis in my
essay, Homo Viator, an analysis which is a kind of nucleus of the
possible phenomenology of the relationships between myself and
others.

We should notice, to start with, that the ego, as such, shows
up in an extraordinarily vivid and aggressive fashion in the mental
world of the child; and one might add that this vividness and
aggressiveness persist, in later years, to the degree to which that
mental world survives in the adult. The child, let us say, runs up
to his mother and offers her a flower. 'Look,' he says, 'that was me,
/ picked it.' His tone and his gestures are very significant; he is
pointing himself out as somebody who deserves the admiration
and gratitude of grown-ups. Look, it is I, I in person, I, all present
and correct here, who have plucked this flower! Above all, don't
believe for a moment that it was Jim or Lucy who picked it. The
child's, '/ did it', in fact, excludes in the most definite fashion
the deplorable misunderstanding by which my exploit could be
^Included in a collection of essays on Evil, by various authors, Plon, Paris, 1948.

[175]

attributed to others. But we find adults standing up in the same
way for the ego's rights. Let us take the example of the amateur
composer who has just been singing, in a throaty voice, a song
for which he has written the tune. Some artless listener asks, was
that by Debussy? 'Oh, no,' says the composer, bridling and
smirking, 'that was a little thing of my own.' Here again the ego
is trying to attract to itself the praise, the surprised and admiring
comments, of a something other than itself, that it uses as a sound
ing-board. In every case of this sort one may say that the ego is
present in the flesh, appealing or protesting, in various tones of
voice, that nobody should infringe on its rights, or, if you like,
tread on its toes. Notice, too, that in all such cases one essential
factor is what I shall call, a little pedantically, ecceity: that is, a
hereness and a newness, or rather a here-and-nowness ; we can
think of the ego in this sense, in fact, as a sort of personified
here-and-now that has to defend itself actively against other person
ified heres-and-nows, the latter appearing to it essentially as just
so many threats to what I have called its rights. These rights,
however, have essentially a prejuridical character, they are from
the beginning inseparably linked to the very fact of existing and
thus are exposed continually to all sorts of more or less mortify
ing infringements. In so far as I feel myself in danger of being
passively overlooked or actively slighted in a hundred different
ways that all cut me to the quick, one might say, in fact, that I
have no protective skin at all, that the quick is exposed already.
The obvious example to take at this point is, of course, that
of the shy young man who is making his first appearance at some
fashionable dance or cocktail party. Such a young man is, as you
so admirably express it in English, to the highest degree self-
conscious. He feels himself the cynosure, and the extremely
vulnerable cynosure, of neighbouring eyes. It seems to him that
all the other people at the party, none of whom he knows, are
looking at him, and looking at him, too, with what meaning
glances ! Obviously they are making fun of him, perhaps of his
new dinner jacket which does not fit him as well as it should,
perhaps of his black bow tie, which was all right when he last
looked in the mirror, but now, he feels quite sure, has gone
lopsided. And then, of course, he cut himself when he was shav-

[176]

ing. And everybody must have noticed how clumsily he held his
glass just a moment ago, so that some of the sherry slopped over.
And so on, and so on ... To such a young man it seems that he
has been literally thrown (as Christians were thrown to the lions)
to the malevolent lucidity of other people's glances. Thus he is
at once preoccupied with himself to the highest possible degree
and hypnotized at the same time to a quite supreme degree by
others, by what he imagines other people may think of him. It is
this paradoxical tension which your excellent word self -conscious
ness so compactly expresses.

But on the other hand this tension is quite at the opposite
pole from what I have at various times called, and shall here call
again, intersubjectivity. And the opposite nature of the two things
cannot be too heavily underlined. Let us suppose that some
unknown person comes up at our party to say a word or two to the
shy young man and put him at his ease. The latter, to begin with,
does not find himself entering into the direct relation with his
new acquaintance that is expressed by the pronoun you but instead
thinks of him as him. Why is he talking to me? What is he after?
Is he trying to satisfy some sinister and mocking curiosity? Let
us be on our guard anyway. Let us be extremely non-committal in
our answers to his questions. Thus, because he is on the defensive
with this other guest, our young man has to the least possible
degree what can be described as a genuine encounter or conversa
tion with him. He is not really with the other any more than he
can help being. But in a very general fashion, indeed, one might
say that it is the relationship expressed by the preposition with
that is eminently intersubjective. The relationship that with
expresses, here, does not for instance really apply to the world
of objects, which, taken as a whole, is a world merely of juxta
position. A chair is alongside a table, or beside it, or we put the
chair by the table, but the chair is never really with the table in
this sense.

But let us get back to our example and let us suppose that
the ice is after all broken, and that the conversation takes on a
more intimate character. 'I am glad to meet you,' says the stran
ger, 'I once knew your parents', and all at once a bond is created
and, what specially matters, there is a relaxation of tension. The

N [177]

attention of the young man ceases to be concentrated on himself,
it is as if something gripped tight together inside him were able
to loosen up. He is lifted out of that stifling here-and-nowness in
which, if I may be allowed a homely comparison, his ego was
sticking to him as an adhesive plaster sticks to a small cut. He is
lifted right out of the here and now, and, what is very strange
surely, this unknown person whom he has just met accompanies
him on this sort of magic voyage. They are together in what we
must call an elsewhere, an elsewhere, however, which has a
mysteriously intimate character. Let us say, if you like, that they
are linked to each other by a shared secret. I shall have to come
back, no doubt, to the notion of the secret as a mainspring of
intersubjectivity, but let us notice, before we leave our example,
that ties of quite a different nature might have grown up between
the stranger and the shy young man. A man whom I run into quite
casually learns that I am very fond of coffee, coffee is desperately
scarce in France at the time, so he gives me a hint about how to get
some on the black market. One cannot say that this incident is
enough in itself to create a bond between me and him ; all we
have in common is a taste, and that is not enough to draw us
-together at the ontological level, that is qua beings. And neither,
on the other hand, is a taste for coffee, even combined with a
certain broadmindedness about means of getting hold of coffee,
enough in itself to create the sense of complicity and freemasonry
in vice that might arise from the avowal, to somebody who shared
it, of some much more dubious inclination. But such a sense of
complicity is not really what we have in mind, either; rather it is
in the sort of case where I discover that a stranger has recognized
the deep, individual quality of somebody whom I myself have
tenderly loved and who retains a place in my heart, that true
intersubjectivity arises.

We could also take examples of intersubjectivity from artistic
and religious experience. But it is clear that there would be no
absolute discontinuity between the examples taken from ordinary
life and those from the higher reaches of the spirit ; on the con
trary there would be a kind of graduated scale, with something
like the mystical communion of souls in worship at the top end,
and with something like an ad hoc association for some strictly

practical and rigidly defined purpose at the bottom. But it would *
be possible to show that a single human relationship can work
its way all the way up and down this scale; this, for instance, is
quite obviously true of marriage. There may be moments of
drought in marriage when the wife becomes for her husband
merely that 'silly creature who should have been busy darning
socks, but there she was clucking round the tea table with a lot
of old hens,' and there may be almost mystical moments when the
wife is acknowledged and loved as the bearer of a unique value to
which eternal bliss has been promised. One might therefore say
that there is an hierarchy of choices, or rather of invocations,
ranging from the call upon another which is like ringing a bell
for a servant to the quite other sort of call which is really like
a kind of prayer. But, as I tried to show in my first Metaphysical
Journal, in invocations of the first sort — where we press a bell
or make some other sort of signal to show that we want service —
the Thou we are invoking is really a He or a She or even an It
treated pragmatically as a Thou. When I stop somebody in the
street to ask my way, I do say to him, it is true, 'Can you tell
me how to get to such-and-such a Square?', but all the same I am ..*
making a convenience of him, I am treating him as if he were a
signpost. No doubt, even in this limiting case, a touch of genuine
intersubjectivity can break through, thanks to the magical powers
of the tone of voice and the glance . If I have really lost my bearings ,
if it is late, if I fear that I may have to grope my way for hours
through some labyrinthine and perhaps even dangerous warren
of streets, I may have a fleeting but irresistible impression that
the stranger I am appealing to is a brother eager to come to my
aid. What happens is, in a word, that the stranger has started off
by putting himself, as it were, ideally in my shoes. He has come
within my reach as a person. It is no longer a mere matter of his
showing me the way as a guide-book or a map might, but of his
really giving a helping hand to somebody who is alone and in a
bewildered state. This is nothing more than a sort of spark of
spirituality, out as soon as it is in; the stranger and I part almost
certainly never to see each other again, yet for a few minutes, as
I trudge homewards, this man's unexpected cordiality makes me
feel as if I had stepped out of a wintry day into a warm room.

On an occasion of such a sort, we have lingered for a moment
on the threshold of intersubjectivity, that is, of the realm of
existence to which the preposition with properly applies, as it
does not properly apply, let me repeat, to the purely objective
world. Within the realm of intersubjectivity, naturally, a whole
throng of different sorts of relationship must be distinguished
from each other. Words like 'ensemble' in French, 'together' in
English, 'zusammeii' in German, can be entirely deceptive,
particularly in the cases where they refer to travelling or even to
working together, to the togetherness of the bus or the factory.
There are certainly cases in which what is called collective labour
can be considered, at least from the point of view of how it looks
on the surface, as the arithmetical sum of the various special
tasks performed by each separate individual. And yet even in such
cases as this there is certainly also something that arithmetic
cannot account for. There is at least in the background a sense of a
common fate, there is certainly an indistinct awareness of the
conditions to which all the workers in such a factory as we have
in mind must without distinction subject themselves, finding,
perhaps in every case, that such self-subjection goes against the
grain. This feeling of community in effort and struggle that such
factory workers have is quite enough in itself to deprive us of
any right to treat them as simple units of force that can be added
to each other. But we should recognize all the same that the level

O

of reality represented by the preposition with can be a rather low
and barren level — and this is naturally even more true in the case
of the togetherness of passengers in a public vehicle. The content
of this sort of reality, the reality for so many people of work and
the journey to work, enriches itself only in the degree they learn
to" know themselves and to know their companions of bus or bench
both in the uniqueness of their diverse beings and in the single
colour of their common fate. It is only on this condition that
a true companionship can be created such as that, for example,
which existed in the army during the late war between fighting
soldiers, and perhaps in a greater degree still between prisoners -
of-war and civilian deportees in various German camps. An
ordeal endured in common is the cement of such companionships,
it is what permits them to arise.

[i so]

But when we talk of common sufferings cementing human
relationships, let us notice that this word is likely to lead us into
error, unless we take it in a much deeper sense than its usual
one, for instance, in treatises on logic : we must think of the
relationship between two terms as something that really does
bind them, as something that causes them to negate themselves as
simple, detached terms. We might make this point clearer if we
said that relationships between things are external, relationships
between people are internal. When I put the table beside the
chair I do not make any difference to the table or the chair, and
I can take one or the other away without making any difference ;
but my relationship with you makes a difference to both of us,
and so does any interruption of the relationship make a difference.
Between two people, in fact, who have an intimate relationship,
a kind of unity tends to be created which makes a third person,
who has not been initiated into the relationship, who does not
participate in it, feel an intruder. Many women must have had
this feeling — and it is a very painful feeling — when their husbands
or their sons had reunions with old comrades of the army or of
the prisoner-of-war or detention camps in their presence. We
come up here, once more, against the notion of the shared secret
(the secret, in our present example, not shared by the intrusive
third party) wrhich I mentioned at the beginning of this analysis ;
and we can see how important and also how ambiguous the notion
is. What appears to the non-initiated person as a secret may be
merely a few jokes, a few allusions, to which she has no clue, and
which therefore inevitably irritate her. But the secret may also,
and in a deeper sense, be a really incommunicable experience —
generally a painful one — about which the initiated feel that others,
who did not share it in the flesh, have no right to speak. It is just
at this point that what we call in France pure sociology, and what
you call anthropology, the study of customs and ceremonies,
strikes on something deeper than itself, something that consti
tutes us in our very selfhood. I have only, for that matter, given
very simple examples here ; from my own dramatic works I could
take more complicated ones, particularly from my Quartet in F
Sharp, of which the first version dates back to the first World
War, but which anticipates in the most concrete fashion this

FiSil

whole philosophy of intersubjectivity.

In this play of mine, I present the extremely rich and in the
end indefinable network of relationships that interweaves itself
between a woman, her first husband (a musician whom she
divorces) and the musician's brother, whom she marries after the
divorce. The climax of the play is the woman's sudden awareness
of a suprapersonal unity which in some sense subsumes under
itself the two men she has successively loved ; she is no longer
able to distinguish whether what she has loved in the second
husband is, or is not, a mere reflection of the first. But on the
other hand the fondness of the brothers for each other resists this
new test, and the movement of the play is towards the discovery,
as it were, of a kind of musical order of relationships in compari
son with which the individual's usual hasty judgments about him
self, and about others, seem precarious and destructive.

The notion of intersubjectivity is obviously capable of
multifarious developments. In the first place, it is not in any
hesitant fashion that I suggest it is only this notion that can throw
light on the more obscure and more important aspects of what is
improperly called psychical but should, I think, be called meta-
psychical research. As Carririgton has made perfectly clear,
telepathy is an inconceivable process unless we are willing to
acknowledge that there is a region where the words / and You
cease to denote two nuclei quite distinct from each other between
which objective relations can be established by the emission of
signals. And if one thinks it over, one will also perceive that all
human intercourse worthy of the name takes place in an at
mosphere of real intimacy that cannot be compared to an exchange
of signals between an emission post and a reception post; this, of
course, is the same sort of point as was made in a previous
chapter when we talked about sensation and the impossibility of
considering it as the equivalent of the emission and reception of
a message.

But there is no doubt at all that we ought to go further, and
to acknowledge that intersubjectivity plays its part also within the
life of the subject, even at moments when the latter 's only inter
course is with itself. In its own intrinsic structure subjectivity is
already, and in the most profound sense, genuinely intersub-

[182]

jective ; and it is at this point that the whole development of our
argument becomes organically connected with the earlier part
of this lecture.

We have already had occasion to notice that it is impossible
to reduce the notion of the subject either to that of a mere formal
principle of unity or to that of an aggregation of states of con
sciousness. Our last chapter, however, should have prepared us
for the path we must follow if this opposition is to be transcended ;
or, in more exact language, for the fashion in which original unity
and plurality are yoked together within the borders of the unique
being that I am.

It seems to me that we can never apply ourselves too strictly
to the following problem : to what degree, and within what limits,
can my relationship with my own past be brought before my mind ?
When, for instance, I see strange faces around me on a bus or in
the tube, I am often haunted by the notion that each of them is
carrying around with him his own past. But what does it mean
to carry around something intangible, of this sort? There, as it
seems to me, our whole problem lies. Of course, we might stop
in our enquiry where the police stop. Each of my fellow passen
gers could be arrested, taken to a police-station, asked to state
his identity, place of residence, and so on. . . . This means merely
that each of them, unless suffering from loss of memory, has the
data to hand that are required for the compilation of his or her
dossier. There is a whole range of headings that might be rele
vant: illnesses, successive changes of residence, of job, religious
affiliations, party membership, and so on. One might say perhaps
that our imaginary detainee has a gramophone record inside that
can reel off the answers to such questions. But just what we mean
by that is still obscure. It will not do to say that he or she is a
gramophone record; but only that he or she can become so if
subjected, as so often happens in our contemporary world, to
persistent questioning, and will become so only to the degree
to which dehumanizing treatment brings about a state of self-
estrangement. All we can say is that from the very start there was
something that could become, or rather could be degraded into,
a gramophone record. This means that we must take it as a basic
assumption that each of us has it in his power to submit his own

experience considered as a whole to the kind of treatment that
inevitably distorts its nature. However, this experience as a whole,
which can be distorted in this fashion, is just what we have in
mind when we talk about somebody or other's past.

It is obvious, of course, that the more a man is detached
from his experience, the more easily it will lend itself to this
distorting treatment ; the more his total experience is something
which he is still actively living, the less easy it will be for him to
extract from it the depersonalized data required as answers to the
police questionnaire. This is the very reason why we assume that
a child, the least detached kind of human being we can conceive
of, will be incapable of filling in such questionnaires. All this
forces us to recognize that we cling to our past in a very uneven
way, that we are our past in a very uneven way, and it must be
added that this unevenness is related to a similar unevenness in
our present situation. Here, as several times before, it is Marcel
Proust who can set us on our way. In other words, we must not
believe that we can at some given moment make a distinction
that will be valid for all the rest of our lives between what I am
now, on the one hand, and what, on the other hand, I am now so
detached from that I can speak of it in an abstract fashion, that I
can reduce it merely to the state of some external object to which
I can refer. On the contrary the moods according to which such
distinctions are made, or are not made, vary with the fluctuation
of our present experience itself. This is enough to show how
unreal it is to represent the past to oneself as in some sense pre
served or pickled, as if it were last year's blackberries or walnuts.
At any moment in my life, a magic shutter may snap back and I
am once more the small boy of eight who is in a state of deadly
anxiety because his mother is so late in coming home and who is
running over in his fancy all the accidents that may have befallen
her. Ought I to conclude from this that I have never really ceased
to be that small boy?

Here again we are up against the apparently self-contradictory
answer, the yes and no, which seems to be inseparable from the
fact of existing as a human being. It would be false to claim that
the little boy has been continuing to exist all these years, just as
a table or a chair continues to exist even when I am not looking

at it. The little boy of eight years old — who, in some sense,
nevertheless, I still am — cannot by any means be conceived to
have persisted after the fashion of a physical object. But on the
other hand my assertion that I have never ceased to be this small
boy is correct if we are ready to admit, like the fairy stories, which
are the perfect symbolical expressions of this kind of truth, that
there are modes of existence that are not objectifiable, but that
have infinite possibilities of resurrection. Yet, strange as the
symbol may be, it is only the extremely simplified expression of
a much stranger reality. Between this latent mode of existence
and the active, waking state in which I go out to post a letter and
have to pause a moment at the pavement's edge to let the traffic
pass, and so on, there lies an innumerable multiplicity of mental
presences, that get in each other's way, and that enter into
relations with me of such various sorts that it would be extremely
useful to classify them even in the roughest and most approximate
fashion. We might express this state of affairs by the simple
formula that I am not merely myself: more strictly, is there any
point in saying I am myself, since I am also somebody else? I am,
for instance, the man I have been until quite recently, the man I
was yesterday : there is a point of view, and a deep one, for which
'have been' and 'was' in such sentences lose all precise significance.
There can be a real struggle for existence between the man I was
yesterday, the man I have been until recently, and the man I have
a tendency to be, a yearning to be, today.

It may, however, be objected at this point that we are here
on a very dangerous road that may lead in the end to a mere flat
denial of continuing personal identity. And we certainly ought
to pause and look into that notion of personal identity, and into
how we ought to understand it.

o

There is, however, a preliminary remark to be made, and it
has to do with the conditions under which a judgment of identity
can be properly made ; for there is obviously no point in talking
about identity, apart from judgments of identity. Now, we have
to acknowledge that it is in the world of tangible things, in the
objective world as such, that judgments of identity seem to be
necessarily and strictly applicable. I lose my watch, say, somebody
finds it and takes it to a lost-property office, let us say to the

very office to which I myself have previously put in an enquiry
about it. The watch that I claim and that is restored to me, because
it corresponds to my description of it, is strictly identical with
the watch that I lost. I am able to assert this not only because I
recognize it but because the man who took it to the lost-property
office found it on the exact spot where I had been sitting and
where I supposed I must have dropped it. Apart, however, from
this whole question of valid identification, we can the more
properly speak of identity in this case because there has been no
perceptible change in the nature of the watch itself between the
moment when it fell from my pocket and the moment when I
got it back from the lost-property office . . . It is a matter of com
mon knowledge that an incident of this sort can be the point of
departure for the dialectical development of what I shall risk
calling an aporetic argument. A few superficial modifications
(my watch, say, got its case slightly dinted by its fall from my
pocket) do not prevent us from affirming that the thing which
has suffered these modifications remains the same thing; but
when the modifications extend their scope (for instance, I get
rid of the old battered case of my watch, and have a new one
made, and then some time later something goes wrong with the
machinery and I have new cogs and springs put in, leaving of the
original watch only its face and the face's glass covering), we may
well hesitate to maintain our judgment of identity, to go on
saying that it is the same watch, and it is obvious that there is no
means of determining in an objective and universal fashion the
precise margin of alteration beyond which the identity of what
has been modified with what it has been modified from, can no
longer be maintained.

Should we say, therefore, with the nominalists, that the
only thing that persists as an element of identity and a principle
of identification is the name? (This is still properly called 7717
watch, the watch that I first bought in such and such a year, however
often all the parts of it are successively replaced by new parts.)
But this solution is obviously a fictitious one ; the real question is
what is it that induces us to maintain the identity of the name, of
the appellation, even in the case where the identity of the thing
as a thing seems to have disappeared. To explain what it is that

induces us, we are obliged to evoke some such notion as that of a
felt quality of identity; but such a quality is in its very nature not
objectifiable. A better example than the one we have used
already, that of the watch of which all the old parts are gradually
replaced by new parts, would be a parallel example taken from
the world of the child. It is not certain that we do really regard
the watch of which all the parts are new, as in some sense the
same old watch after all. But for the child the doll, of which head
and arms and legs have been successively broken and replaced,
does remain in a very vivid and real sense the same old doll;
because the variable elements of the object have been caught up
into the unity of the subjective sense of possession, and almost of
adoration, that the child feels for this specially beloved object.

But what considerably complicates the problem is that quite
apart from this permanence of a felt quality in the object, or a
feeling about the object — a permanence which we ought not to
call identity in the strict sense of the word — there is in the object
itself the continuity of an historical becoming, and this even in the
case where the felt quality of identity is absent. Let us take an
example. Two or three years ago, I ran into an old schoolfellow
whom I had not seen for a good forty years ; I remembered him
as a boy with red cheeks and bright eyes ; I rediscovered him as an
old gentleman with a flaccid face, whose eyes were quite expres
sionless. There was nothing in the quality of these two appear
ances, nor in my feelings about them, that could confirm that
they were two appearances of the same person. All I could say is
that I had an abstract, theoretical certitude that I should have
been able to establish the existence of a continuity between
these two contrasting states of the same bodily organism. But,
indeed, that is not quite all: I should be able to assure myself
that this man had memories which corresponded with my own
memories of the period when we attended the same school.

This example is rather an instructive one, for it enables us
to emphasize the contrast, where identity is concerned, between
the realm of the He, She, or It on the one hand and that of the
Thou on the other. There was nothing within me that, when I
saw my old comrade, cried out joyously: 'So it is you, so it is
really you again. . . .' Life, in such a case as this, has eroded

something away; yet on the other hand I have an indefeasible
certitude — some would say a mystical certitude — that if beyond
the gulf of death I were to re-encounter those whom I have really
loved (those, that is, who have been linked in the most intimate
possible inters ubjective fashion to what I am) I should recognize
them instantaneously and as if by a flash of lightning, and it would
be just as if no separation had ever taken place. This, however,
is an act of faith, and it is not until my second volume that we
shall be examining its possible foundations.

What emerges, finally, from this long analysis is the extreme
complexity of the problem, as we call it, of personal identity.

Between the objective identity that we can affirm in the
world of tangible things and what I have called the felt quality
of identity there is obviously a gap; we can have the objective
identity without the felt quality, and also, of course, the felt
quality without the objective identity. Given such conditions,
and given the general background of our argument, it is impos
sible not to acknowledge the usefulness of the notion of a kind

o

of manifoldness within the self. But before attempting to define
the nature of the manifoldness, we should make the following
observation. At the level of feeling as such, quality (and most
philosophers of the past have acknowledged this fact without,
however, recognizing its implications) infringes upon, or one
might even say usurps, the place of subjectivity as such. A felt
quality, or a quality of feeling, that is, is not a mental object ; one
can make a distinction, for instance, between seeing a colour and
the colour one sees, but not between feeling a pain and the pain
one feels. The felt pain is an indissoluble unity. If it is true, as we
have seen already that it is, that sensation cannot be understood on
the analogy of transmission or passive reception, this is a fortiori
true of feeling. This is a very important fact in relation to personal
identity, properly so called; it enables us to get a better grasp
of what I tried to express earlier when I spoke of my past which,
in a sense, I still am, and on which my present situation is at every
moment forcing me to make petty raids. These are rather like
withdrawals from a small current account at the bank, where the
greater part of my capital is not so easily available, being on
deposit. But even this deposit account, though blocked for my

[188]

everyday purposes, remains, however unhandy a one, an asset;
and this is where the metaphor breaks down, for my past really
cannot be considered as an asset, even a blocked asset, of this
kind.

These remarks presuppose, and I hope that to some extent
they clarify, a notion of the nature of time that is not that of
common sense nor of commonsense philosophers. I shall not,
at this point, raise the question whether it completely coincides
with Proust's notion, but it is certainly akin to his.*

It is invariably the case at this level of discourse that, when
we begin to expound any important notion, we have first of all
to express ourselves in negative terms. Thus I must first of all

r o

explain just how duration, or personal time, ought not to be
represented. We ought vigorously to reject any attempt to
represent my life, or any human life at all for that matter, as a
sequence of cinematic images. It is not strictly speaking the
spatial representation of time that is the snag here, but rather
the supposed relationship between a sequence of images and the
life which the sequence claims to represent. It is part of the notion
of cinematic images as such that they succeed each other; they
follow on each other's heels and one takes the place of another.
As a mere spectator, supposing myself to be in a state of extreme
fatigue or perhaps merely of perfect relaxation, I let them flow
past me, as on the edge of a stream one lets the current flow past.
But in so far as there is a real substance in my life, or in anybody's
life, it is impossible that my life should reduce itself to a mere
flow of images, and impossible therefore that its structure should
be merely that of a succession. Why, it may be asked, is it
impossible? It is not that we have run into something that is
absurd at a merely logical level : it is simply that we have to
acknowledge that our inner experience, as we live that experience,
\vould be an impossibility for a being who was merely a succession
of images. And for that matter the old idealist argument still
does retain, in this case, all its force. A succession is only a
succession for an awareness that in some sense transcends it.

Yet this idealist argument is still more or less merely an

*As expounded by Georges Poulet in his wonderful Etudes sur le Temps Humain,
Edinburgh House Press, 1949.

argument at the level of formal logic. We must go deeper. In
spite of what the Herbartian psychologists thought, a feeling, as
such, cannot be reduced to a mere play of images. What is intrin
sic to a human life, as it is experienced from the inside, is that
it can no more be translated into terms of film than it can be
adequately translated — as we have seen already that it cannot —
into terms of story. But can we transform these negative state
ments into some kind of positive assertion? This is just where we
have to be careful, for, having set the idea of succession aside, we
are obviously in danger of coming back to a representation of the
inner reality of my life as something static and invariable, some
thing that cannot be budged. But such a view of things would be
a complete illusion. Everything budges; there is every reason to
believe that even the things that seem to us to not be moving, the
static tables and chairs, are in a state of continuous imperceptible
change ; and this, indeed, is what every positive scientific approach
presupposes. The only thing that does not move, that cannot
move, is the concept, the abstraction, which is treated as if it
were a real thing, that is, hypostatized. It is part of the intrinsic
nature of the abstract as such that it resists any attempt to intro
duce into it the flow of succession.

But let us not be misled by sheer fiction. If we are
expressing our meaning with strict accuracy, all we ought to say
is that from the moment I postulate some abstract notion or other
—let us say, the notion of the truths of geometry — I in some sense
withdraw that notion from the stream of time. Nevertheless,
considered as a discovery of the human mind, the notion has its
roots in history. It was in certain given historical conditions, to
a conscious being dependent in some sense on these conditions,
that the notion was first revealed. It would not have been possible
for just anybody at all, living under any set of conditions what
soever, to have hit upon the truths of geometry. Of course, as
soon as they have been discovered, the theorems of geometry can,
at least in theory, be taught to anybody, at any time, and at any
place. I say in theory, for it is permissible to conceive that there
might be certain kinds of given psychic or even social conditions
under which it would be impossible for any child or even for any
adult to concentrate on the theorems of geometry the kind of close,

[190]

continuous attention that is needed to grasp them; though of
course this purely contingent impossibility would not in any
sense affect the validity of the theorems themselves. More
generally, I should say that any truth of this sort, though eternal
qua truth, can conceivably lie covered up, for an indeterminate
length of time, and from an indeterminate number of individuals.

What conclusion can we draw from all this about the very
complicated, very difficult problems that have exercised us since
the beginning of this lecture? In the first place, it seems to be
only the concept, the mental abstraction, that is intrinsically
irreducible to succession; in the second place, however, we have
seen that human life also will not really let itself be represented as
a purely successive phenomenon, there being something in its
structure that is not properly comparable to a succession of
images. It would seem, then, that we are forced to conceive of
the principle of life as being itself something at least akin in its
nature to the concept arrived at by abstraction. On the other hand,
we have acknowledged that if we want to remain loyal to the
data of experience, we cannot cut the abstract truth itself quite
away from its roots in history. We are thus impelled almost
irresistibly to envisage the necessity of transcending the opposi
tion between the successive and the abstract, between the endless
changing flow of sensation and the static eternity of the concept,
and to bring in a new category, which we cannot yet properly
locate ; only everything leads us to suppose that this new category
will have some relation not only to the spiritual in general, but
to whatever the specific notes of the spirit, as such, may be. But
at this point we ought to try to keep our thinking as concrete as
possible ; we should be alert for any messages from our most
intimate inner experience. For in the last analysis our task is
nothing less than that of perceiving in what fashion life can be
organically linked with truth.

One might, indeed, say that all our investigations, from
chapter four onwards, have been directed towards the discovery
of this co-articulation of life with truth; we have, as it were,
delicately stripped the surrounding tissue so as to lay the joint
as bare as it can be laid. As it can be laid, I say: for when I talk
about 'laying it bare', of course, I am still the prisoner of meta-

phors taken from sight. All the verbs I have been using refer to
the possibility of exposing to view something that has been
lying hidden away from view. Yet, in a fundamental sense, the
point of juncture of life and truth is not something that can be
exposed to view : for the simple reason that it lies in a dimension
beyond life's probing, that of depth itself. Here we discover the
ultimate significance of the notion of the secret with which we
have had several encounters already. What we have to grasp is
that there is present in history this kind of depth, that can
uncover itself at many levels, but especially at the level of one's
own life, and especially \vhen one ceases to conceive of that life
as something that could be adequately expressed in terms of
story or film; for story and film are merely flimsy, makeshift
bridges flung by us across a gulf that is always there.

In a fragment of my Metaphysical journal that dates from
January, 1938, and that has not yet been collected into a pub
lished volume, I have made a real effort to disengage what it is
that we really mean by depth, or profundity, when we talk for
instance about a deep thought or a profound notion. A profound
notion is not merely an unaccustomed notion, especially not so
if we mean by 'unaccustomed' simply 'odd'. There are a thousand
paradoxes that have this unaccustomed quality, and that lack any
kind of depth ; they spring up from a shallow soil and soon wither
away. I would say that a thought is felt to be deep, or a notion to
be profound, if it debouches into a region beyond itself, whose
whole vastness is more than the eye can grasp ; the image I had
in mind, in 1938, was that of narrow tongues of water, like those
which crisscross among clusters of Dalmatian islands, at the
mouths of which one catches a sudden bewildering glimpse of the
whole broad dazzle of the sea. Our experience of depth does
seem to be linked, in this way, to the feeling that a promise is
being made, but that of the fulfilment of the promise we can
catch no more than such a glimpse. But what we should notice
at this point is that this distant glimpsed prospect, this dazzling
yonder, as one might call it, is not felt as being elsewhere; though
we should have to describe it as a distance, yet we also feel it as
intimately near to us — 'Near, and hard to catch hold of, says
Holderlin, 'is God' — and we have to transcend the spatial and

merely pragmatic distinction between what is here and what is
somewhere else. This distance presents itself to us as an inner
distance, as a land of which we should have to say that it is the
land we are homesick for — as being, in fact, just what the lost
homeland is to the exile. A man's homeland may be distant but
it has a tie with him that cannot be broken ; his nostalgia is quite
different from his youthful dream of a strange, foreign country,
for it is that foreign country (however vividly he may imagine it
and even if he goes there and lives there) that remains essentially
a region of fancy, a somewhere else. But a man's own country
is not something fanciful, it is something in the blood.

We must therefore, I said in 1938, concentrate our attention
on the condition of a being who is not at one with his actual
surroundings. Mere chance has landed the exile where he is, his
place is only by chance his own place ; he has a sense of being an
exile because he is aware, in contrast, of somewhere that really
would be his own place. In the given, contingent conditions,
to which he must submit, however, this real place can only
be evoked as a beyond, as the home of homesickness. All this
could be related to those childhood experiences, that are at the
basis of all the later imaginings that really arouse our emotions,
and that centre round images of secret hiding places, of islands

o o I

and caves. We know, of course, that psychoanalysis seeks to
explain away the child's myth of the 'real place' in terms of
subconscious sexual symbolism ; but in the last analysis we must
recognize that this discipline, seeking to destroy all the old myths,
offers us a new one in their place, that of the pre-natal Eden of the
embryo in the womb.

Let us notice, however, that what we have been expressing
in terms of space could also be expressed in terms of time. And
this change of key is of the liveliest interest to us here, in relation
to our own argument. In terms of time, the deep thought, or the
profound notion, is the one that pushes well ahead; it opens, that
is, a long path that can be followed up only in time; it is like an
intuitive dive into an investigation which can be developed only
over a long period of lived, personal, human time. Nevertheless,
it would certainly be wrong to interpret the notion of depth in
terms of mere futurity. What is important is that, from our present

o [i93]

point of view, the future cannot be thought of, or represented
as, mere novelty, as something new and unforeseeable which
simply takes the place of the used, stale present. The novelty of
the future may be as attractive a notion as you like, but we cer
tainly do not feel we are moving into depth, as we thrust on to the
future, merely because we are moving towards novelty. The notion
of depth crops up, or so it would seem, only in the case in which
we think of the future as somehow mysteriously in harmony with
the most distant past. One might even say, however obscure such
a notion may at first appear, that in the dimension of depth the
- past and future firmly clasp hands ; and that they do so in a region
which, from the relative points of view of all my heres-and-nows,
and all your heres-and-nows, would have to be described as the
absolute Here-and-Now ; and this region where the now and then
tend to merge, as the near and the Jar did in our previous illus
tration, would and could be nothing other than Eternity; this
word that we cannot do without, but which expresses a notion
that we cannot body forth in any tangible fashion, in our present
context takes on its full force. Die tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit — these
are the words of Nietzsche, to whom, in my second volume, I
shall need perhaps to refer explicitly. Let us acknowledge in passing
that his hypothesis of the Eternal Return represents an attempt,
justifiable at least in principle, to express in the language of
causality this mysterious linking of the future with the past which
can in reality take place only in some region transcending the
world of cause and effect. These very difficult notions that I have
just been expounding will, I believe, become easier to grasp in
the second series of these lectures, when I deal with the nature
of hope. For the moment, it is sufficient if my evocation of them
permits us at least to get a glimpse of the sense in which the
opposition of the successive, as such, and the abstract, as such,
can be transcended at a supratemporal level which is also, as it
were, the very depth or inwardness of time.

We ought, in fact, to go over all that has been said in this
chapter, bearing our new notion, the notion of depth, in mind
for it is a notion useful for throwing light, even if in itself a difficult
notion to throw light on. This paradox — a paradox which, as we
shall be forced to recognize in the final lecture of this series,

I1 94]

should rather be described as a mystery — is undoubtedly at the
basis of the only valid way in which we can conceive the notion
of essence, in the sense in which that notion is contrasted with that
of existence; and in the sense, also, in which to talk of something's
essence or essential nature, is not a mere abstract fiction — the es
sence of something being in this case merely the aspect that we
cannot disregard, as, for instance, in geometrical reasonings, we can
disregard the size and colour of represented figures — of use
merely for promoting enquiries of limited scope. The essence of a
straight line is to be shortest distance between two points, but
what is the essence of my being or my life ?

To draw these remarks to a close, I should like to ask you
whether you think that, in relation to my childhood and to every
body who was mixed up in one way or another in my childhood,
my situation could, fundamentally, be anything other than that
of an exile : unless I were to give myself over quite completely to
abstract reasonings on a certain limited number of objective
data, data which I should be substituting for the rounded and
palpable whole of my childhood, my past, my life. And yet it is
strange but true that this feeling of exiled homesickness does not
necessarily imply that my childhood was an unusually happy one ;
except in extreme cases, which constitute abnormal exceptions,
this nostalgia for childhood is connected merely with our sense
that childhood is an irrevocable state of wonderful irresponsibility,
of being still the object of protective care and tender guidance.
I find all this splendidly expressed in Proust's great novel and in
Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiographies. But what is really strange
is the fact that, in spite of everything that is implied by the cur
rent belief that time's arrow flies only one way, a man, as he
grows older, has nearly always the feeling that he is growing
nearer to his childhood; though the gap of years between him and
his childhood is growing, at the same time, wider and wider.
There could be no more striking demonstration that this arith
metical or linear representation of the temporal process is
basically inadequate in relation to a life that has been really lived.
It cannot be by mere chance that our contemporary interest in
the civilizations of the remotest past has reached such a pitch of
intensity. This fact would be absolutely inexplicable if it were

f'9f]

true, as certain contemporary philosophers claim, that man is
essentially a project, or if he denned his nature above all by the
degree, at any given time, of technical progress and by the
advances beyond old boundaries that such progress had made
possible. These are both very superficial interpretations of the
human situation, especially the latter one; nevertheless in
our own day, man is more and more strongly tempted to accept
such over-simplified interpretations, and to reject every view
of life which they exclude.

At the beginning of the next lecture, which is also the last
in our present series, I shall try to illustrate and make actual
what I have just been saying, by stripping away some of the pecu
liarities that hide from us the true nature of the family bond.
What it is to belong to a family, and to be attached to it, is
something which it seems to me that neither biology nor socio
logy is capable of probing right to the core ; and on the other
hand, speaking rather generally, one might say that the family
relationship is not one which up to the present has sufficiently
engaged the attention of metaphysics.

CHAPTER X

PRESENCE AS A MYSTERY

IN the latter part of the last chapter we saw that in some sense
or other, certainly so far in a rather obscure sense, it does seem
possible to transcend the opposition between the flux of succes
sive images and the timelessness of the abstract concept ; and if
that opposition can be transcended at a supratemporal level, that
is, at the level of time's other dimension of depth or inwardness,
it follows that I must think of myself not merely as somebody
thrust into the world at a moment of time that can be historically
located, but also as bound to those who have gone before me in
some fashion that cannot be brought down to a mere linkage of
cause and .effect. It is from this point of view that we ought to
consider what I have elsewhere called the mystery of the family
bond ; which is itself, for that matter, only a particular expression
of that general mystery of being to which we shall be devoting
our attention in my second volume. No doubt, of course, it does
seem rather odd to deal with a particular expression of the mys
tery of being before treating the whole subject generally. But we
must not forget that our task is that of a quest or an investigation,
following up successive clues, and not that of the didactic exposi
tion of the consequences and corollaries that would follow from
the acceptance of certain initial axioms or the proof of certain
initial theorems.

It ought to be noticed, before we go on any further, that
the point of view from which we are considering the reality of the
family bond is what might be called a metasociological one. I
mean, simply, that we are going deeper than sociology does.
Sociology, so long as it remains at its own proper level, cannot
begin to state our kind of problem: which is, in fact, our old
problem, 'What am I? And how is it that I am able to ask myself
what I am?', with a new face.

[-97]

We are living today, to be sure, or at least so it seems, in a
world in which the notion of sonship, and the notion of father
hood too, are tending to be emptied of that richness of meaning
which they possessed for other societies. The philosophy that is
tending to triumph today is the old philosophy of the eighteenth
century, of the Aufkl'drung, in a new dress. For that philosophy,
the metaphysical reality of sonship is one superstition among many
others and ripe for the rubbish-heap. It is important therefore
for us to get a firm grasp of the almost completely negative
conception of sonship which is tending to define itself and to
assert its authority before our eyes. It seems to define itself, in
fact, basically in terms of a refusal — a refusal to acknowledge the
existence in life, in the fact of being alive, of a value that allows
us to think of life as a gift. The old French expression 'devoir le
jour a' — to owe the light of day to — would never be used by
anybody today. It is not enough to say that it has become rather
trite to talk of owing the light of day to one's parents. The notion,
or rather the feeling, that these words express is no longer
experienced except in a residual fashion. There are certain basic
reasons for this state of affairs ; the most obvious of them, on the
face of it, is that to be alive in such a tragic and such a threatened
world as ours seems to many people not a gift but a penalty —
but, a penalty, after all, pronounced by whom? And a penalty for
what crime ? Can one be justly punished for an offence that one is not
aware of having committed? But this is not the whole story. Let
us look at it from the side of fatherhood, as well as from that of
sonship. In very many cases, is not the act of begetting a child
something unpremeditated, the act of somebody who is not
behaving in a responsible fashion, and who is very far from taking
upon himself everything that his act will entail for somebody who
never asked to be born? It is precisely this affirmation, reinforced
by a question and by an exclamation, 'I never asked to be born,
by what right — by what right! — has life been inflicted on me?'
that lies at the roots of that contemporary nihilism, to which I
shall have to come back much later. You will not have failed to
notice, however, that we here touch again upon a state of affairs
which took up our attention in chapter two . What we should notice
particularly, however, is that from this negative perspective.

this perspective of refusal, the bond between father and son
gradually tends to lose every spiritual quality ; it is conceived of
now merely, in a rather vague fashion, as a somewhat obscure
objective relationship, which can be of interest, from a strictly
technical point of view, to the biologist alone. We might say
that we are witnessing a more and more general disavowal of
fatherhood, but a disavowal, paradoxically, mainly pronounced
by sons. But naturally the process becomes to some extent
reciprocal ; when sons deny the rights of fathers, fathers are likely
to refuse to acknowledge that they have any responsibility towards
sons.

I know that I probably seem to be painting a rather gloomy
picture here. In the majority of cases this basic situation of
estrangement between father and son is masked by customary
tolerance and ordinary human decency ; but it breaks through to
the surface in a very striking way in contemporary literature. In a
body of work like that of Sartre's, a body of work whose import
ance cannot be brushed aside, this situation of estrangement

o

emerges in a most definite shape ; one might even say that Sartre's
world is one where fatherhood, whether as a fact or as a value,
has actually ceased to exist; it would be no exaggeration, in
fact, to call this a world in which a man claims, in Sartre's
slightly technical phraseology, to choose himself as the son of X,
and therefore equally to reject himself as the son of X. But in
relation to the general body of human traditions of feeling and
behaviour, this is an innovation of a completely revolutionary
sort. It is, in the most exact sense of the word, an impious inno
vation; and it is not by mere chance that Orestes, in Sartre's very
first play, has the beau role just in that (not in spite of the fact
that) he is the murderer of his mother.

It is rather important to ask ourselves how, or rather where,
we are going to take our stand when we are faced with such a

O O

refusal to recognize life as a gift and therefore to acknowledge
the metaphysical reality of sonship. It is pretty clear, at least, that
we cannot simply condemn such refusals as infringing certain
rules of morality, which we assert to be self-evident and beyond
discussion; if we are to protest against this kind of nihilism, it
can only be in the name of a sort of depth of reality which the

nihilism refuses to recognize and, as it were, blots from view;
it was just this very depth, in fact, that I was trying to make mani
fest in my essay, Homo Viator. This deep reality, that nihilism
ignores, has to make this same act of recognition and acknowledge
ment whose central importance for our thesis I have so often
underlined. It is essential to the very notion of being a father that
one should recognize one's son, and acknowledge him to be one's
son; and to that of being a son, that one should recognize and

O o

acknowledge one's father's fatherhood. But I am not talking at
this point, naturally, of recognition in the merely legal sense.
I am not envisaging the case of the man who may be forced to
recognize, and to contribute to the support of, a casually begotten
bastard ; what we are concerned with is a much deeper and more
intimate kind of recognition — and a kind of recognition that is
bound up with an activity of a very actual and very vital kind. If a
man, in fact, fails to show any real interest in his child, he is
behaving as if he did not recognize the child as his own ; we are
within our rights in saying that in such a case the father does not
recognize the child, and even that real fatherhood is lacking, at
least in the human sense of the term ; from a purely biological
point of view, in so far as heredity is a scientific fact, it continues
of course, to manifest itself, whether or not the biological father
behaves like a human father. But really, of course, the notion of
fatherhood has its true and full meaning only at the human level ;
dogs, for instance, those casual and promiscuous creatures, are not
really fathers in the human sense, though there are certain animal
species — one thinks particularly of birds — in whose behaviour
there is something like an anticipatory sketch of human father
hood. We ought to be aware, however, that in such cases we are
always interpreting bird behaviour on the analogy of human
behaviour; human behaviour, as we intimately experience it,
is our point of departure.

What has just been said of fatherhood might also be said of
sonship — though, while the father has often in the past refused
to acknowledge the son, it is only in our own days that the son,
except in very exceptional circumstances, has refused to ack
nowledge the father. What is also misleading is the notion of a
moral imperative, a notion really springing in the last analysis

[200]

from the Ten Commandments : 'Honour thy father and thy
mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee'. Reflection shows us, however, that this
commandment can have meaning only against the background of
certain given structural social conditions ; in a world that had
become entirely proletarianized, the given conditions would
tend to abolish this commandment or at least to rob it of any
concrete significance. This is not to say that in such conditions
one would be within one's rights in not honouring one's father,
but more profoundly that an entirely proletarianized world would -
produce an increasing number of beings who in their very depths
would feel themselves as being fatherless — as being nobody' 's sons,
Fils de Personne to quote the title of a contemporary French play* —
and who would feel this even though the individual who had
physically begotten them were still alive.

It seems clear, therefore, that the notion of human father
hood is one that is applicable within fairly strict limits; at one
end of the scale it disappears to leave in its place a mere biological
phenomenon; at the other end the biological phenomenon
disappears without destroying the essentials of human fatherhood ;
I am thinking of the case of adoption — and here, too, we must
look beyond legal definitions, for there can be legal adoption
without the accomplishment of that spiritual act of which I am
always thinking, and on the other hand the act can be accom
plished in cases where legal adoption, for one reason or
another, is impossible. The words 'spiritual act' here should be
taken in their strongest possible sense ; one does not become the
adoptive father of somebody merely through having a sudden
impulse of affection, but only through a self-commitment to which
one will have to remain faithful in spite of almost certainly inevi
table lapses of interest, disappointments, and setbacks. Ought we
to conclude, however, from the possibility of becoming a father
by adoption, that it is necessary to make a radical distinction
between spiritual and biological fatherhood? That, I think, would
be a very rash thing to do. On the contrary, we ought to maintain
that in normal circumstances the separation of the two kinds of
fatherhood is something that ought not to be brought about, and
*By Henry de Montherlant.

[20,]

even ought not to be able to be brought about ; where there is such
a separation it is because of some flaw in the individual's physical
framework or social situation. But let us be wary about what we
intend to convey here by the word 'normal' ; I am not thinking
of a norm in an abstract sense, some formal rule of ethics whose
basis would be hard to discover and which would subsist somehow
or other beyond the world of everyday experience, but rather to
a certain fullness of life wrhich, when spiritual fatherhood is
separated from biological fatherhood, becomes something for
which the reflective consciousness feels a certain homesickness.
Thus parents who have adopted a child, and who love the child
with all their heart, cannot fail to feel a certain regret, except
in very exceptional cases, that it is not the child of their own
bodies. The exceptional cases I have in mind are those where, if
the child was physically their own, they would risk transmitting
to it certain hereditary weaknesses ; but a satisfaction of that kind
is, after all, an extremely relative satisfaction — taking its rise in
something that is in itself a smart, a wound, a humiliation.

It is, in fact, very possible that in our actual world a dissoci
ation between the spiritual and the biological is becoming quite
generally operative; but this is only one more proof that our
world is a broken world ; it is only a broken world that could give
rise to such practices, for instance, as artificial insemination.

Such topics, to some of my readers, may seem strangely alien
to the kind of investigation to which this volume is devoted.
Such readers, however, I believe, are the victims of a mere
illusion, an illusion which consists in the last analysis of adhering
to that conception of the spirit as something at the opposite ex
treme from the flesh, or as something completely transcending the
flesh, against which I have never ceased to protest. In a very
general fashion indeed, one might say that the difficulty we have
had, in the course of these lectures, continually to confront
lies in the very fact that the spiritual seems to wish to claim for
itself the dignity of a separate existence, whereas in a deeper
sense it only constitutes itself effectively as spirit on condition
of becoming flesh. The example, that we have taken already, of
adoption is very significant in this new regard; adoptive parents
only really become parents on condition that they lavish on their

[202]

adopted child the most actual, the most material, and the most
humble cares and services, the same which they would have
bestowed upon him if they had really engendered him. In this
sense adoption is a kind of grafting of the flesh on to the spirit,
and it cannot be anything else ; it is wonderful that it should be
possible at all, and in fact its possibility shows up better than any
thing else the limits of every philosophy of life that claims to base
itself on purely biological considerations.

Yet, on the other hand, nothing can give us a more intense
feeling of insecurity and strangeness than this human situation of
ours; the situation of a being placed at the point of juncture, or
of co-articulation, of the vital and the spiritual. It is not a matter
of the sense of strangeness that would be felt by an observer of
the situation from the outside — but of the strangeness that is felt
from within by somebody who recognizes the situation as his own.
Let us recall, for that matter — what goes without saying to
anybody who has grasped the significance of these investigations
of ours — that the very notion of observing the situation from the
outside is, in this context, a meaningless one. It is of the very
nature of our situation that it can be grasped only from within
its own depths. But at the same time — and here we touch again
on a point made at the very beginning of this volume — in a world
like our own, which is becoming more and more completely
subjected to the dominion of objective knowledge and scientific
technique, everything, by an almost fatal necessity, tends to fall
out as if this observation of our situation from the outside were
a real possibility. From that falsely objective point of view, the
very phrase 'spiritual reality' is in danger of becoming emptied
of all meaning; or rather what is still called 'spiritual reality' is
offered for our consideration as a mere superstructure, an epiphen-
omenal garment that masks, and rather thinly masks, a basic
hurrying of matter : it might be demonstrated that an assumption
of this sort, shared by both parties, is the mainspring of that
strange convergence so often noted by scientists, at least in
France, of strictly biological generalizations, on the one hand,
with Marxist speculations on the other. Both biologists and
Marxists are seeking to arrive at an interpretation of life at the
purely objective level; only, unfortunately, the kind of objective-

[203]

ness they are aiming at entails a preliminary, and complete,
elimination of the subject as such.

We know of course that we are not, from our own point of
view in these lectures, to understand the notion of the subject as
it has traditionally been understood by idealist philosophers.
Neither the transcendental ego of Kant nor the monad of Leibniz
has any place in our argument. It is precisely in order to under
line that fact that I have been emphasizing the notion of the family
bond and its mysterious character. At the point we have now
reached, it is on this new and difficult notion of mystery that we
must concentrate; it is the notion in which this whole first
volume logically culminates, and it is around this notion, as a
starting point, that the lectures in my second volume will be
built up.

When I talk about the mystery of the family bond some of my
readers, I fancy, are disconcerted. The family is an institution;
it is a fact ; it is something which can be studied, at least in some
of its aspects, by the methods of positive science. In talking about
its mystery, am I not bringing in a touch of vague literary floweri-
ness at a level of discourse where such battered ornaments of
speech have no proper place? However, as we have seen already,
the situation with which we are concerned, in our special
context, is one whose true nature can be grasped or acknowledged
only from the inside ; there are no objective statements that can
be made about it from the outside, for by definition it is our
situation, the situation we cannot get outside of. That is why
the kind of writer who makes the mystery of the family palpable
to us is always, for example, the novelist rather than the historian
.of social institutions. However, though these remarks help to
clear the ground a little, we have not yet succeeded in giving the
term 'mystery' that very precise and almost technical sense which
alone can justify its introduction into the vocabulary of a philo
sopher.

Perhaps the shortest way towards our needed definition of
the notion of mystery would be to begin by working out the
distinction, at the spiritual level, between what we call an object
and what we call a presence. Here, as always, we are taking as our
starting point certain very simple and immediate experiences, but

[204]

experiences which philosophy, until our own day, has always
tended to overlook. We can, for instance, have a very strong
feeling that somebody who is sitting in the same room as ourselves,
sitting quite near us, someone whom we can look at and listen
to and whom we could touch if we wanted to make a final test
of his reality, is nevertheless far further away from us than some
loved one who is perhaps thousands of miles away or perhaps,
even, no longer among the living. We could say that the man
sitting beside us was in the same room as ourselves, but that he was
not really present there, that his presence did not make itself felt. But
what do I mean by presence, here ? It is not that we could not com -
municate with this man; we are supposing him neither deaf,
blind, nor idiotic. Between ourselves and him a kind of physical,
but merely physical, communication is possible ; the image of
the passing of messages between a reception point and an emission
point, which we have rejected on several other occasions, is in
fact quite applicable here. Yet something essential is lacking.
One might say that what we have with this person, who is in
the room, but somehow not really present to us, is communica
tion without communion: unreal communication, in a word.
He understands what I say to him, but he does not understand
me : I may even have the extremely disagreeable feeling that my
own words, as he repeats them to me, as he reflects them back
at me, have become unrecognizable. By a very singular pheno
menon indeed, this stranger interposes himself between me and
my own reality, he makes me in some sense also a stranger to
myself; I am not really myself while I am with him.

The opposite phenomenon, however, can also take place.
When somebody's presence does really make itself felt, it can
refresh my inner being ; it reveals me to myself, it makes me more
fully myself than I should be if I were not exposed to its impact.
All this, of course, though nobody would attempt to deny that
we do have such experiences, is very difficult to express in words ;
and we should ask ourselves why. The fact is that the notion of
the object, as such, is linked in our minds with a whole set of
possible practical operations (* This object is a typewriter, and
this, and this, and this, etc. are what you do with it. . . .') that
can be taught and that can thus be regarded as generally com-

municable. But these considerations do not apply, in any sense
at all, to the notion of the presence, as such. It would be quite
chimerical to hope to instruct somebody in the art of making his
presence felt : the most one could do would be to suggest that he
drew attention to himself by making funny faces ! The whole
business would be rather like teaching a woman how to have
charm. It is as clear as can be that the notion of a lesson in charm
is a self-contradictory one (one could have lessons in deportment,
etiquette, and so on, but one can know about these things with
out having charm, and one can have charm without knowing
about these things). In fact the whole notion of teaching charm,

o / o

as of teaching people to make their presence felt, is the very
height of absurdity.

In my Metaphysical Journal, under the date, 23 February,
1923, I had this to say about charm : 'It seems to me that the more
constrained a person's behaviour is, the more his attention is
taken up with precise, specific purposes, the less charm he has.
Thus men, in general, have less charm than women and children.
J., speaking about the odd case of the child who lacks charm, is
apt to say that such a child is too finicky, too exact: and such
phrases express very well the absence of a sort of aura, of inde
cision, or of vagueness, round the charmless person's words and
acts. There is nothing more impossible to acquire, by a deliberate
exercise of the will, than charm; and in fact there is a kind of
willing — the willing that implies constraint — which basically
excludes the very notion of charm. The tensed-up person cannot
be charming, ever. Charm is a kind of margin to personality, it is
the presence of a person spreading out beyond what he actually
says and what he actually does . . . It is an overplus, a beyond . . .
And since it cannot be created by an effort of will, it has, of
course, no ethical equivalent. Someone has charm if he sprawls
out easily beyond his virtues, if these seem to spring from some
distant, unknown source. And only the individual, in direct con
tact with another individual, can feel his charm. It would be
absurd to investigate charm as a kind of quality which we could
consider in abstraction from whose charm it was. For it is not a
physical quality, like red hair; nor a moral quality, like self-
control; nor an intellectual quality, like a gift for mathematics.

[206]

Thus the assertion, "X has charm", or "X had charm" tends to
undermine itself. There would be something rather grotesque,
for instance, in mentioning the deceased's charm in an obituary
notice'.

Though we cannot, of course, regard charm and presence
as merely identical, charm does seem to be one of the ways,
nevertheless, in which a presence makes itself felt. Felt, of course,
by this, that, or the other specific person; felt in an atmosphere
of a certain intimacy; not necessarily felt, obviously, by anybody
at all who comes across our charming person at a large public
meeting. And this very fact that charm, which is the expression
of a presence, works in some conditions and not in others, for
some people and not for others, underlines the non-objective
character of the notion of presence. Non-objective does not,
however, in our present context, really in the least mean merely
subjective, in the privative interpretation of that phrase; it does
not mean being more or less of the nature of an intermittent
hallucination. Instead of subjectivity, we should think of inter-
subjectivity. Charm is non-objective but it is intersubjective.
However, even the term 'intersubjectivity' might give rise to
misunderstandings, for one might conceive of a content — still
an objective content — that could be, as it w^ere, transmitted from
subject to subject. But the very notion of transmission must be
excluded at this level of discourse; the communion in which
presences become manifest to each other, and the transmission
of purely objective messages, do not belong to the same realm of
being; or rather, as we shall see when we embark on the subject
of the ontological mystery, properly so called, all transmission of
objective messages takes place, if we may so put it, before we
have yet reached the threshold of being.

As always in the higher reaches of thought, we must be on
our guard against the snares of language ; when I distinguish the
notion of a presence from that of an object, I run the risk, of
course, of turning a presence for some of my listeners, into a sort
of vaporized object that contrasts rather unfavourably with the
tangible, solid, resistant objects that we are used to in what we
call real life. But, in fact, when we say that a presence must not
be thought of as an object, we mean that the very act by which

[207]

we incline ourselves towards a presence is essentially different from
that through which we grasp at an object; in the case of a pres
ence, the very possibility of grasping at, of seizing, is excluded in
principle. These distinctions still define the notion of a presence
in a quite negative way. We shall see our way more clearly if we
say that a presence is something which can only be gathered to
oneself or shut out from oneself, be welcomed or rebuffed ; but
it is obvious that, between the two notions of gathering to one-

o o

self, or welcoming and seizing, there is a fundamental underlying
difference, a difference of attitude. If one thinks carefully, one
sees that I cannot gather to myself, or welcome, what is purely
and simply an object; I can only, in some sense, take it, or else
leave it. It goes without saying that the kind of taking or prehen
sion I am thinking of, is apprehension by the intelligence, or in a
word, comprehension. In so far as a presence, as such, lies beyond
the grasp of any possible prehension, one might say that it also
in some sense lies beyond the grasp of any possible comprehension.
A presence can, in the last analysis, only be invoked or evoked,
the evocation being fundamentally and essentially magical : now,
we may of course think of magic as a discipline that is concerned
with objects as well as with presences — that brings rabbits, for
instance, unexpectedly out of hats — but in point of fact it is
concerned only with what we may call the presential side of
objects. What the magician attempts is to make the rabbits present
in his hat, to transform them into a presence, in the sort of case
in which, apart from his efforts, the rabbits in his hat would be
merely notional or even absolutely elsewhere. To grasp the nature
of the contrast I am underlining between the presential and the
notional, or the schematic, side of objects, we have only to com
pare an inventory with a poem : an enumeration of objects may,
indeed, become poetic, but only if somehow or other it has a
magical effect, if the objects, as they are enumerated, become
present to us. A rose in a poem can be something that is present
to us in this way, but not, in most cases, a rose in a seedsman's
catalogue .

We should, of course, recognize that this contrast between
the use of words in a poem and the use of them in any sort of
practical list of objects may not, in actual fact, be so clear cut

[208]

as we are making it here. Words perhaps are essentially magical,
it is in the nature of the word, as such, to evoke a presence. But
we have to use words for practical purposes ; so little by little
this magical, evocative power of words tends to disappear. The
function of poetry is that of restoring this very power to language,
but the conditions in which it can be restored, today, tend to
become more and more hermetic.

The purpose of these very brief remarks is to give us a
glimpse of the nature of a presence, as something which can,
indeed, only be glimpsed at. Let us notice, moreover, that the
actual presences that surround us are very rarely consciously
experienced by us as presences ; in so far as we get used to them,
they become almost part of the furniture, though it only needs
something that jolts us out of our ordinary habits, such as a serious
illness, to destroy this everyday aspect; the break in habit that an
illness brings with it enables us to grasp the precariousness of
that everyday atmosphere of our lives which we thought of as
something quite settled. Thus there grows up, or there can grow
up, a bond between the precarious and the precious. But under
what conditions is this possible ? If we place ourselves at a purely
objective viewpoint, we can hardly see anything more in illness
than the breakdown of an apparatus, but we already know, long
before we reach the stage of analysis, that this so-called objective
account of the matter is not really true to the facts ; for an illness
impinges on the being of the person who is ill, and, in the
presence of his illness, he has to define his attitude towards it;
but this is a kind of fact that can have no equivalent at a purely
objective level. We should recall, at this /point, what we said in
an earlier lecture about the body ; the 'latter is not merely an
instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite
different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it,
my body, is also my way of being in the world.

But let us notice, on the other hand, that if the doctor's
account of my illness as a breakdown in an apparatus is inadequate,
the priest who comes to visit me and tells me to regard the illness
as a trial or tribulation inflicted on me by God is not in much
better case ; for he also places himself outside the troublesome
and mysterious reality which is that of my illness itself. Just like

P [209]

the man for whom I am merely a machine, the priest shows him-
V. self incapable of transcending the plane of causality. But it is just
that transcendence which is necessary here, and it is only on
condition that we effect such a transcendence that we can ack
nowledge the mystery of our illness. But let me express myself
more strictly: to recognize my illness as a mystery, is to appre
hend it as being a presence, or as being a modification of a pres
ence. What we are essentially concerned with is somebody other
than ourselves in so far as he is a sick man, or it would be better
to say with my neighbour and the call he is making to me — the
call to show myself compassionate and helpful. In the case, how
ever, where it is I myself who am ill, my illness becomes a pres
ence to me in the sense that I have to live with it, as with some
room-mate whom I must learn to get along with as best I can ; or
again the illness becomes a presence in so far as those who care
for me, and play the part of a Thou to me in my need, become
intermediaries between me and it. Of course, in the case in which
my illness has utterly prostrated me, in a state either of complete
collapse or acute pain, my illness, paradoxically, ceases, as a
separate presence, to exist for me ; I no longer keep up with it
that strange acquaintanceship which can be a struggle, or a dan
gerous flirtation, or the oddest blend of both.

One might develop these remarks at length in order to show
how suspicious we ought to be of those lectures on illness which
people seem so specially apt to deliver if they have never been
seriously ill themselves : what rude health they always seem to
- enjoy, those bluff haranguers of the sick! Quite literally, they do
not know what they are talking about, and their smug loquacity
has something very insolent about it when we consider the terrible
reality they are faced with, a reality which they ought at least to
respect.

If I have lingered rather over this example, it is firstly because
in the special case of illness the co-articulation of the vital and
the spiritual is really palpable, and secondly because the example
- shows us how and why it is that the co-articulation cannot give
rise to knowledge. We are still at the level of the test or the
ordeal, with all its ambiguity. I may be tempted to see in my ill
ness the prelude to my death, and therefore to let myself float

[2,0]

down its current, without making any real attempt to turn up
stream. But I can also think of the illness as of a battle in which I
must take the initiative ; and from this point of view my first
attitude will seem to me a kind of treason of which I must never
be guilty. But these are still superficial contrasts ; it may fall out
that, though in the first stage of an illness I have to show this will
to resistance, later on, however, I am forced, if not exactly to
'give up', at least to recognize the inevitable, and by my recog
nition to change the meaning of the inevitable and thus to change
at the same time the very nature of the climax which I am power
less to modify. We shall have to come back to this point in my
second volume, when we deal with the topic of death; but even
now we can see how all our previous arguments lead up to an
interpretation of death that will make it seem a mystery and not a
mere objective event. To judge otherwise would be to forget
everything that has been previously said about the impossibility
of severing the spiritual from the vital, and about the misunder
standing, which all such attempts to arrive at the spiritual in a
'pure' state imply, of the conditions of existence under which
we belong to the world.

So far, however, we have merely been approximating,
through concrete examples, to the definition we are looking for:
but we must now try to determine, with as much precision as
possible, just where the opposition between the two notions of
the problem and the mystery lies. I shall confine myself here to
reproducing the most important passage on this topic from my
book Being and Having. I am quoting from the English translation
of the book.

'A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete
'before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce.
'But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved,
'and it can therefore only be thought of as "a sphere where the
'distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses
'its meaning and its initial validity". A genuine problem is
'subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which
'it is defined ; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every
'conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible

[2,,]

'(logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to
'turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious
'proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a
'kind of corruption of the intelligence. The problem of evil, as
'the philosophers have called it, supplies us with a particularly
'instructive example of this degradation.'

'Just because it is the essence of mystery to be recognized or
'capable of recognition, it may also be ignored and actively
'denied. It then becomes reduced to something I have "heard
'talked about", but which I refuse as only "being for other
'people" ; and that in virtue of an illusion which these "others"
'are deceived by, but which I myself claim to have detected.'

'We must carefully avoid all confusion between the mysterious
'and the unknowable. The unknowable is in fact only the
'limiting case of the problematic, which cannot be actualized
'without contradiction. The recognition of mystery, on the
'contrary, is an essentially positive act of the mind, the
'supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may
'perhaps be strictly defined. In this sphere everything seems
'to go on as if I found myself acting on an intuition which I
'possess without immediately knowing myself to possess it —
'an intuition which cannot be, strictly speaking, self-conscious
'and which can grasp itself only through the modes of experience
'in which its image is reflected, and which it lights up by being
'thus reflected in them.'

For those who have read so far, it does not seem to me that
the actual meaning of this passage will be very difficult to grasp.
One ought, however, to underline the following points. The
opposition between the problem and the mystery is always in
danger of being exploited in a tiresomely 'literary' way by writers
without a proper philosophic grounding, who lose sight of the
technical relevance of the distinction. The sort of philosophy that
I have been trying to present to you in this volume makes a very
special appeal to the eloquent amateur, and that, in fact, is one
of its most disquieting features; we have only to compare it, in
this respect, to the exact sciences, to see just where the danger
lies.

[212]

The man who states a mathematical formula, even if he does
not judge it necessary to go over the proof that has established the
formula, is always in a position to do so if he wants to. I have
expressed that elsewhere, in a metaphor which perhaps sounds
rather frigid in English, by saying that round the cogs and springs
of mathematics the golden watchcase of demonstration, a sort of
handsome protective covering, is never lacking. And it is the
same with all the laws of nature. It is always at least theoretically
possible to repeat the experiments from which such laws have
been inductively arrived at. But this cannot be the case for us.
Existential philosophy is at all times exposed to a very serious -
danger ; that of continuing to speak in the name of various kinds
of deep inner experience, which are certainly the points of
departure for everything that it affirms, but which cannot be
renewed at will. Thus the affirmations of existential philosophy
are perpetually in danger of losing their inner substance, of ring
ing hollow.

And perhaps it is at this point, as we draw, for the time
being, towards the close of these difficult investigations, that we
at last get a precise notion of one of the essential notes of the type
of philosophy that is being put forward here. It should by now be
very clear that a philosophy of this sort is essentially of the nature -
of a kind of appeal to the listener or the reader, of a kind of call
upon his inner resources. In other words, such a philosophy
could never be completely embodied into a kind of dogmatic
exposition of which the listener or reader would merely have
to grasp the content. It is, in fact, from this very point of view
that the question of the opposition between problem and mystery
ought to be approached. When I am dealing with a problem, I am
trying to discover a solution that can become common property,
that consequently can, at least in theory, be rediscovered by
anybody at all. But, from the very commencement of these lec
tures, we have seen that this idea of a validity for 'anybody at all'
or of a thinking in general has less and less application the more
deeply one penetrates into the inner courts of philosophy ; into,
that is to say, that spiritual reality with which, in fact, our investi
gations have been concerned. In the last analysis, the idea of an
acquisition (as it is an acquisition to know how to speak French,

or how to play the piano, or how to work out quadratic equa
tions) is inadequate in such a context as this. The greatness of
philosophy, though it will seem to most people the disappointing
side of philosophy, is just this impossibility of regarding it as a
discipline which can be acquired ; where we are concerned with
the highest matters, with if you like, presences, we cannot hope
to come across anything at all comparable to the permanent
acquisitions of the elementary sciences. I underline, there, the
word elementary: for I think it is true that when we leave the
teachable elements of, say, mathematics and climb up towards the
principles, the enabling acts, of the science, our perspectives
begin to blur, just as they do in philosophy. We cannot be sure,
after all, that in a hundred years from now men may not have a
notion of the principles of mathematics that will be different in
very many ways indeed from the notion that prevails today.

At the very highest level, in fact, the line of demarcation
between philosophy and the sciences tends to fade away; and I
am convinced that there are many mathematicians who would not
refuse to acknowledge that mathematics, too, has its mystery.
But below the very highest level, the word 'mystery', in such a
context, has no meaning; given some system of signs or other,
whose structural validity one deliberately refrains from question
ing, it is clear that arithmetic, algebra and geometry can push
on ahead with no fear of running into any obstacles ; and the
person who sets out to prove a group of theorems, one after the
other, will feel that the same calm light of truth is shed evenly
over all of them. What shows very clearly that this is the case is
the greater and greater perfection and efficiency, in our own time,
of calculating machines. It would be very interesting — and it
would be a task for which I would be quite incompetent — to
investigate the general conditions within which the functioning
of a machine is feasible. It is clear that these conditions, whatever
they might be, would be quite incompatible with whatever it is
that we indicate by the term mystery, (in passing, let us notice
that 'indicate' is improperly used in this connection, since strictly
speaking we can only use a term to indicate, or point at, an object, )
since it is inconceivable that the most complicated machine which
we can imagine would be able to undertake the speculative and

reflective task of working back to its own sources, and of determ
ining the conditions that make its achievements feasible. For in
speculation and reflection we soar above every possible kind of
mechanical operation; we are, in the strict sense of the phrase,
in the realm of the spirit — though here again, alas, language
undermines itself, for when we speak of the realm of the spirit
we are still thinking vaguely of some place or other, and yet at
this level the very act of providing any kind of spatial background
for the operations of the mind is inconceivable, unless, indeed,
we bring in the notion of a space of inner experience — compar
able to the time of inner experience — to which we referred at the
beginning of this volume. We cannot, in fact, dispense with some
remnants of spatial imagery, and yet it will be difficult to justify
their use.

But what can be at the basis of this kind of secondary reflec
tion, (which seeks, as it were, to establish the conditions of
primary reflection and of the more mechanical operations of the
understanding,) except a sort of fundamental dissatisfaction? It is
probable, indeed, that the philosophical activity has no other
boundaries than those of its own dissatisfaction with any results
it can achieve. Where that dissatisfaction disappears, and instead
we have a sense of somehow being snugly settled, the philoso
phical activity has disappeared, too. It might be objected that the
scientist, too, has to be on his guard against the danger of snugly

settling down. But we must distinguish : this is true of the scien
ce o

tist who aspires towards philosophy, but not, it seems to me, of
the scientist qua scientist — for the simple reason that the scientist,
in his conception of the external world, is and must be com
pletely a realist ; he is concerned with an order of truths which
he must consider as wholly outside of, and completely distinct
from, his own self. The strange greatness of his task and his
mission consists in the fact that he really is lifted out of himself
in this way, and the word ecstasy, in its literal root meaning,
would apply exactly to his state, if, by a regrettable perversion of
language, we did not usually reserve it for the sort of lyrical
orgasm which is still the activity of the self. With the scientist,
the self has, in so far as it possibly can, vanished away. His task
is to bring order into a world which is as little as possible his own

particular world, which is as much as possible the world in
general ; and from his own point of view, it is certainly not up to
him to ask whether this notion of 'the world in general' is a
fiction. Thus when order has been established among things,
the scientist must declare himself satisfied; only, this order
can never be anything more than a partial order; if his
activity has a theoretical side, that consists still merely in the
stating of the kind of hypothesis that will temporarily hold
together his partial and verifiable results. And these results them
selves have been obtained either by experiments or, in the most
refined case, by primary reflection relating solely to our exper
ience of things, of objective data, strictly so called.

But the philosopher finds himself in a completely different
situation, and it is essential to his activity that he should reflect
deeply on this situation, in order to get a gradually more and more
ample insight into it. Now, one thing that we may feel we have
really established in this first volume is that this process of getting
an insight has essentially nothing to do with the objective as such;
we do not get an insight into something whose reality, by defini
tion, lies completely outside our own. We have been forced to
insist more and more emphatically on the presence of one's self
to itself, or on the presence to it of the other that is not really
separable from it. And we have, in fact, real grounds for stating
that we discern an organic connection between presence and
mystery. For, in the first place, every presence is mysterious and,
in the second place, it is very doubtful whether the word 'mys
tery' can really be properly used in the case where a presence is
not, at the very least, making itself somehow felt. In the course
of a recent conversation on this topic, I brought up the example of
the mysterious character that attaches to the presence near one of
a sleeping person, especially of a sleeping child. From the point
of view of physical activity, or at least in so far as the notion of
physical activity is defined in relation to the possible grasping
of things, the sleeping child is completely unprotected and
appears to be utterly in our power ; from that point of view, it is
permissible for us to do what we like with the child. But from
the point of view of mystery, we might say that it is just because
this being is completely unprotected, that it is utterly at our

[2,6]

mercy, that it is also invulnerable or sacred. And there can be
no doubt at all that the strongest and most irrefutable mark of
sheer barbarism that we could imagine would consist in the
refusal to recognize this mysterious invulnerability. This
sacredness of the unprotected lies also at the roots of what we
might call a metaphysics of hospitality. In all civilizations of a
certain type (not, of course, by any means merely in Christian
civilizations), the guest has been regarded as all the more sacred,
the more feeble and defenceless he is . In civilizations of a certain
type, I say : not, I might have added, of the type dominated by the
ideas of efficiency and output. We are touching here, once again,
on certain social topics to which we 'referred at the beginning of
this volume. The more, it might be said, the ideas of efficiency
and output assert their supreme authority, the more this attitude
of reverence towards the guest, towards the wounded, towards
the sick, will appear at first incomprehensible, and later absurd:
and in fact, in the world around us, we know that this assertion
of the absurdity of forbearance and generosity is taking very
practical shapes.

The above remarks may appear to have a merely cursory
and superficial value. But that would be a mistaken judgment.
The example we have just presented does throw into very bold
relief that co-articulation of reflection and mystery around which
the whole of this final chapter has been built up. When we talk
about the sacredness of the defenceless, because it is defenceless,
we are not dealing merely with a pragmatic and in a sense
ceremonial attitude of which the sociologist, or perhaps the
psychoanalyst, might claim to discover the origins. It is precisely
against all such claims that philosophy, if it is to be true to its
own nature, must take its strictest stand. It is something really
essential that is here at stake.

And it is with an attempt to define this new term, essential,
that I would like to draw this first series of Gifford Lectures to a
close. Probably, in seeking to discover what we mean by essential,
it is best to start by seeking to discover what we mean by import
ant. At a first glance, it seems that when I decide that something
or other is important I am relating it to a certain purpose of mine
or perhaps, more generally, to a way in which I organize my life.

If I centre my life upon some predominant interest, say,
for instance, the search for pleasure, power, or money, every
thing that seems likely to subserve this interest will strike me as
having positive importance, and everything that does not as hav
ing negative importance. Experience, however, shows us, and
its lessons cannot be rejected or ignored, that our special ways
of organizing our lives are always liable to collapse like houses of
cards under our very eyes; leaving something else in their place,
something which the original structures of lust, ambition or greed
had merely masked from us. This something else, which we are not
yet in a position to define, and of which we have not perhaps even
a direct apprehension, is not the important, but the essential, the
'one thing needful'. It is obvious that the believer, at least, has
a name for this 'something else' : he will say that the one thing
needful is salvation, but the latter is a term of which philosophy
ought not to make a premature use. The first question, rather,
that can be asked at a strictly philosophical level is whether one
can, or cannot, affirm that in the life of the individual something
of absolute, not merely of relative, importance is at stake. It is
round this theme, in fact, that my second series of Gifford
Lectures will be building themselves up. But we can acknow
ledge even at this moment that by our labours up to this point
we have cleared away some of the obstacles from the path that
leads to an answer to this question.

These obstacles, there can be no doubt at all, have all to do
with a tendency within us to transfer the definitions and the
categories that are valid only in the purely objective world into
a realm of discourse where they do not properly apply. Following
in the steps of Bergson, we have seen that this temptation to make
a falsely objective representation of the inner world is at work
not only when I am thinking of such a general concept as time,
but when I am thinking of what I call my own particular life and
history. We have thus been brought to recognize what one might
call the transhistoric depth of history; which is, no doubt, the
best short cut we can take towards the idea of Eternity. Moreover,
as we shall see by and by even more clearly, the nexus between
the ideas of Eternity and mystery is as strict a one as can be. In
the first place, Eternity cannot be anything other than a mystery;

[2,8]

we cannot, as it were, figure it to ourselves in terms of a map,
even an endless map, that could be rolled out on a table. The
spatial images, through which we get our first insight, no doubt
always a rough and inadequate insight, and one needing much
correction, into so many other concepts, are here, even in the
very first instance, totally out of place. In the second place, every
mystery is itself like a river, which flows into the Eternal, as into .
a sea. All this, of course, must be taken in a very vague and general
sense; but it is true for each of us, and true especially in relation
to our roots in the family, true, that is, in relation to the conditions
under which we have been able to make our appearance in the
world.

But to what degree, and within what limits, is it possible for
us to raise ourselves above that condition of being in the world
which is our specific mode of existence ? To what degree are we
within our rights in turning our glances up towards a higher sphere
than this ? What are — at the point where we are supposed not yet
to have received the enlightenment of any special revelation —
these floating, glittering, these unfixed lights, that can to some
degree throw light into the obscurest depths of our being? These
are the formidable problems that will be facing us in my second
volume. I am under no illusion that we are moving forward on a
plain and beaten path; may we be granted, during this arduous
journey, that help that is rarely refused to those who are animated
by the love of truth alone. Of truth alone. That is indeed the first
and the last word, alpha and omega ; and lest we seem to be draw
ing these lectures to a close with too hopeful a flourish, let us say,
as our very final word, that every society pronounces sentence of
doom or acquittal on itself according to the throne of state which
it reserves, both within itself and high above itself, for that
Truth which is not a thing, but a spirit.

APPENDIX

WORKSBY GABRIEL MARCEL

Journal Metaphysique, Gallimard, 1948.
Etre et Avoir, Aubin, 193^.

[English translation, Being and Having, The Dacre Press, London, 1949.]
Du Refus a 1'Invocation, Gallimard, 1940.
Homo Viator, Aubin, 1945".

La Metaphysique de Josiah Royce, Aubin, 1947.
Positions et Approches Concretes du Mystere Ontologique, Vrin, 1949.

[English translation included in The Philosophy of Existence, The Harvill

Press, London, 1949.]

PLAYS

Le Seuil Invisible (La Grace, Le Palais de Sable) Grasset, 1914.

Le Quatuor en fa diese, Plon, 1929.

Un Homme de Dieu, 192^, (new edition, Grasset, 1950).

L'Iconoclaste, Stock, 1923.

Le Coeur des Autres, Grasset, 1921.

Trois Pieces (Le Regard Neuf, La Mort de Demain, La Chapelle Ardente),

Plon, 1931.

Le Monde Casse, Desclee de Brouwer, 1933.
Le Chemin de Crete, Grasset, 1936.
Le Dard, Plon, 1936, (new edition, 19^0).
Le Fanal, Stock, 1936.
La Soif, Desclee de Brouwer, 1933.
L'Horizon, aux Etudiants de France, 1945.
Theatre Comique (Colombyne, La Double Expertise, Les Points sur les I,

Le Divertissement Posthume), Albert Michel, 1947.

Vers un Autre Royaume, (L'Emissaire, Le Signe de la Paix), Plon, 1949.
La Fin des Temps, in the review Realties, 19^0.

^/&i^ J

Marcel, G.

The n^stery of being.

B"
2430

,M25
M82
v.l
cop. 3

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